Speaker Trevor Taylor with Rotarian Bryce Lillecrapp
Last night Rotarians heard a presentation from Trevor Taylor from RDA Services. His topic was "How to Survive in Today's Business World." His message; social media, social media, social media.
Whilst most Rotarians in this club are retirees, it is always important to keep our fingers on the pulse of business in case it affects things like investments and superannuation. It was also interesting to gain an insight into how businesses today are run so very differently than those we may have been involved in in the past.
With Trevor's vast experience with the Regional Development Association, and having authored the book "Obtaining Ultimate Results from your Loyalty Club", he was well placed to try and educate us in this fast moving and ever evolving aspect of business.
Trevor started by illustrating his point with some examples of businesses that have been 'disrupted' because they failed to develop new marketing strategies; Dick Smith, ToysRUs and Radio Rentals were impacted drastically by Ebay and Amazon; taxis were impacted by Uber and; hotels were impacted by Air BNB. He said the key concern in this current age of the Millennial is all about the environment but accessibility to product is paramount.
Enter Social Media - Stage Left!
Trevor stressed that with a world population of 7.1 billion and 21 billion mobile phones worldwide, that social media and digital media simply cannot be ignored. Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumbl, Wechat, YouTube are here to stay and it is imperative business owners today customise their marketing and business practices to include them if they wish to retain their market share.
Trevor explained how QR Codes work. They are a barcode which can be attached to a product or a business window and is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached. In practice, QR codes often contain data for a locator, identifier, or tracker that points to a website or application.
Lastly, we heard about Loyalty Programs. Personally I think this was Trevor's real passion and primary interest. He said a good loyalty program promotes communication between the company and its customer (know your customer and their needs), provides cheap advertising, encourages repeat purchases and hence, rapid growth. Get it right and you flourish! To illustrate that point, Trevor gave us a few statistics on companies like Priceline, Costco and Starbucks. If you get it wrong, you disappear. To illustrate that point Trevor gave us a few statistics on companies like Radio Rentals and Dick Smith.
Trevor finished with a video and a funny anecdotal story involving United Airlines. Not so funny for United Airlines however, who lost $180 million after manhandling and destroying a band member's $3,000 guitar and not taking it seriously. After months of being mucked around, the band wrote a song about the incident, uploaded it onto YouTube and ... 19 million hits, went viral ... next time United Airlines probably took all complaints somewhat more seriously! An example of how effective a tool digital media is.
