“Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business” by Hiroshi Mikitani (Palgrave McMillan, $27).
Mikitani founded Rakuten, the third largest e-commerce marketplace company in the world; you may be familiar with its Internet presence Buy.com (which is now Rakuten.com). When he writes about the future of e-commerce, marketers would do well to heed his been-there-done-that-what’s-next advice. The rules he’s rewriting are based on five principles: 1. Always improve; 2. Always advance; 3. Hypothesize, practice, validate and systemize; 4. Maximize customer satisfaction; 5. Speed, speed, speed. Here are some highlights:
Rules of expansion: Integrate the world into your business plan. Start reading foreign news regularly. This provides information on doing business abroad and introduces country-centric themes, demography, politics and social trends that will affect your global plans. Study global success stories, too. Look for common denominators.
These insights help with market entry because you’ll be able to communicate “who you are and what you value”; they also help tailor your message (i.e. What plays in Portugal may not play in Poland.)
Rules of the Internet: The Web isn’t a global vending machine (i.e. a tool for “efficiency, profit and standardization”) where consumers point-and-click their orders. It’s an open window to collaboration between makers, sellers and consumers. Each player in the make-to-buy decision loop can provide feedback to each other. By sharing information, you can find out what’s happening real time — and gain insight into possibilities.
The Web can also make shopping an entertainment tool. When you go to a bricks-and-mortar mall, you can go to a number of stores, or just window shop. At Rakuten.com, you can browse by scrolling through many products and discover new things just as you can at your local mall.
With over 430,000 followers (I’m one) on Twitter, people clearly value Mikitani’s e-commerce expertise.
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“simple: conquering the crisis of complexity” by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn (Twelve, $26.99).
Consider the following consumer healthcare policy language: “Not included are charges for anything not listed in a. through g. above including but not limited to…” From a consumer’s standpoint, using “not” three times in one sentence of an insurance policy doesn’t communicate assurance or value. The same can be said of most credit card, warranty and loan documents. English is hard enough to understand with its homonyms, heteronyms, texting abbreviations and a lack of accent marks that cue pronunciation.
What happened to simple language? Legalese. In an effort to dot every i and cross every t, lawyers also found a way to ensure they get paid. The use of jargon contributes, too. Who hasn’t been rolled their eyes at alphabet-soup acronyms and dictionary-defying definitions that professionals use to make them sound professional. Unless you watch Criminal Minds, or are in law enforcement, you probably don’t know what “BAU” and “unsub” mean.
Medical, engineering and scientific terms play their part. Who can really understand the information that comes with prescription medications? It’s filled with medical jargon, molecular diagrams and charts — and you need a magnifying glass to read it.
Then there are customer-service menus that take us through a myriad of choices in an effort to ensure we don’t talk to a human. It took me almost five minutes to verify a deposit using my credit union’s convenient telephone banking system. My only other option was an estimated 15-minute hold time to speak with a customer service rep.
And then there are governmental regulations — which bring us full-circle to legalese.
The authors believe that real communicators explain in ways that truly inform. They “think about their listeners and adjust their message, vocabulary and level of detail accordingly.” Less is more.
Jim Pawlak is a nationally syndicated book reviewer.
