Now they also have an outstanding new website. Unveiled on Christmas Even the new MFA website is fantastic and befits this fine organization.
More about what makes this website so perfect for an association serving the floral industry.
Rod Crittenden and his team at the MFA office in Haslett MI do an outstanding job of running the MFA on behalf of the dedicated and hardworking volunteers of the Michigan Floral Association. They have one of the best associations in the country, an outstanding annual convention, a great golf tournament, and much more.
Now they also have an outstanding new website. Unveiled on Christmas Even the new MFA website is fantastic and befits this fine organization. More about what makes this website so perfect for an association serving the floral industry.
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For most of us the next few months involve a lot of gift giving.
One great gift, especially when you really aren't sure what someone might want, is flowers. Almost everyone loves getting flowers, they are given much less frequently (and appreciated much more) than alcohol, and they're never offensive or inappropriate. Flowers really are the perfect gift for almost anyone – friends, colleagues, clients and co-workers . They are certainly ideal when you attend a dinner or house party and you ask yourself, or the host, "what should I bring?". Bring flowers. In situations like these the best thing to do is send them over a day early, or earlier in the day, so that the host has time to include them when setting the table or decorating the house. This means calling a florist, or visiting their website, and placing an order. This seems simple, and it should be, but people called order-gatherers try and make it harder. They masquerade as real local florists. They'll take out fake listings in the phone books and fake ads in the yellow pages of countless towns, all designed to convince you that they are genuine local flower shops when in act they are just a call center hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Same thing on the web – they will run multiple websites, again optimized to appear like local flower shops wherever you are sending. And online and on the web they will frequently use the name and sometimes even addresses of established local flower shops. All this to convince you to place your flower order with them – an order they have no way of filling themselves. Why? Because they will then try and trick a real local florist into delivering it for them for a lot less money. The service charge and part of the delivery fee that you paid? They usually just keep that outright – they don't even mention it to the florist that actually prepares and delivers your flowers. What about the money you paid for the product? They'll usually mislead the filling florist about that too – their goal is to spend as little as possible as long as they can get something that kind of resembles what it is that you really paid for. Real florists are great people and they will always do their best on every single piece but these order-gatherers really make it hard. You order a $100 piece and expect good value, but the order gatherer hires the real florist to make something for $60. When you order flowers – and you should – make sure that you deal with a real local florist. For more details on how to do that check out this article on the best way to buy flowers on the Bring Flowers website. There is an interesting article on CareerCloud about job interviews that did not take place in a traditional office. It features five stories of different interview scenarios, none of which involve an office.
With more people telecommuting in-office interviews are no longer always possible. It is fascinating to see how some employers are embracing the challenge and coming up with ways to learn more about a prospective hire than they ever could in an office. Some new content was added to the pricing resources section of the Beyond Cost Plus site that covers two very important pricing concepts:
Anchor Pricing The idea here is that introducing an anchor price early on can make subsequent prices look much better in comparison. Think about the price tag you see on a sale item. The larger undercounted price is almost always prominently displayed because it acts as an actor that makes the smaller discounted price seem much more attractive. The new content includes both a definitions and some real world example of anchor prices are used to establish value. Decoy Pricing The concept of decoy pricing draws on the asymmetric dominance effect – the idea is that if one option completely dominates another it becomes much more attractive. Decoy prices are introduced to do just that – be completely inferior to another specific option in all possible aspects – making that option much more attractive to the consumer (and steering them towards the option that the vendor had in mind). Decoy prices were covered beautifully in the bool Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The new content includes his famous example (from The Economist magazine) as well as a few others. One looks at subscription plans for the New York Post while another looks at how decoy pricing was used on an Indiegogo campaign. After falling in love with Google Autheticator I've added some content on multi-factor authentication and the extra security it provides to my personal site.
It sounds intimidating but when you break it down into the the three main types...
... it becomes very approachable. And the benefits – in the form of increased security and peace of mind - make it worth understanding. It also helps make the advantages of the new Chip & PIN credit card technology obvious. Chip & PIN was introduced in Canada a few years ago and it's coming to the US soon. It's hard to get excited about something we rely on as much as credit card payments but in this case the benefits are so great that the change (and the headache that comes the first time you have to enter your PIN on a credit card sale and you really can't remember if you even got around to setting it up...) is absolutely worthwhile. Charles at Delfs Engineering has come up with a way to call a script on FileMaker Server when the Perform Script on Server command is not available.The Perform Script on Server command that was introduced in FMS 13 is very powerful but there is a serious limitation – it can only be called from a client running FileMaker Pro/Advanced 13. Many deployments have upgraded their servers but not their clients so this new command remains out of their reach. And of course there also deployments running FMS 12, in which case Perform Script on Server simply isn't an option.
At least not using native scripting. But you can call a script on the server using CWP and the Insert From URL script step. Charles provides more details and an example on his FileMaker blog. There are other advantages as well:
Some things to keep in mind:
The American Institute of Floral Designers, more commonly just referred to as AIFD, has worked to advance the art of professional floral design through education, service and leadership since 1965 – almost 50 years.
I'm happy very happy to be able to say that FloristWare is an industry partner of AIFD and has participated in two of their annual symposiums. In fact FloristWare is the only independent technology or POS provider that supports AIFD. It is a pleasure and an honor to support this great organization, their volunteers and their members.. The "almost fifty years" part is very relevant right now because next year, 2015, is the 50th anniversary of AIFD – a significant milestone in their history. The Annual Symposium – always a great event – will be even bigger and better than usual as they celebrate this special anniversary. In 2015 the symposium takes place in Denver Colorado in early July. More information on this and most other events in the floral industry can be found in the FloristWare Floral Industry Resource Guide. Differential Pricing and Price Discrimination have a a great deal in common and are sometimes used interchangeably. There are however some important differences worth noting.
Price discrimination refers to charging different prices for identical (or very similar) products. Differential pricing can include price discrimination, but it can also employ product – different versions of the same product. This product differentiation allows for a greater variety of products and prices. The Beyond Cost Plus site has some new content that hopes to better explain and illustrate the two terms and the differences between them. In addition to definitions there are also some examples and real world case studies that everyone should be able to relate to. Pricing hurdles are used to selectively discount as part of a price discrimination strategy. By forcing customers to jump over a figurative hurdle the seller sees that they are indeed focussed on saving money and discounts, while not discounting to those that were not prepared to jump over the hurdle.
Sometimes a hurdle is self-propagating in that it makes itself even more effective. For example a midnight madness sale is a hurdle because most people don't want to shop at that time. The madness creates a secondary hurdle in the form of a diminished experience – in addition to the weird hours you also have to deal with crowds of frenzied shoppers, long lines, etc. The Beyond Cost Plus site takes a look at the tradition of "Cheap Tuesdays" (discounted admission to the movies on Tuesday nights) as an example. Hurdles, in the context of pricing, can be an effective part of a price discrimination strategy. New content on the Beyond Cost Plus site looks at how the promotion below uses a product attribute, color, as a hurdle to selectively discount effectively. This same product is offered in a wide variety of very attractive colors, but the discount is specific to this one particular color. The color (which the ad itself explains is not desirable).is the figurative "hurdle" the customer has to jump over in order to get the discounted price.
The seller would probably sell more units if they discounted all colors, but they would also be "leaving money on the table" by discounting when they hadn't really needed to. They don't want to discount to the person that really wants his favorite color, or the color that matches their favorite apron. They only want to discount to the customer that is willing to take the least desirable color in order to get the deal. This is why hurdles, when used properly, are so effective. They efficiently and automatically stream customers according to what they really value. In this case the people that like the prettier colors pay full price, the people that care more about cost pay a discounted price. The ad also makes very effective use of some of the principles documented by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. They use the scarcity principle by referencing limited quantities and product shortages, triggering the fear of loss (a very powerful motivator). They use social proof by referencing the behavior of other customers.... the ad suggests that most customers don't want brown, but love this bargain. And by making the admission that brown is not very popular (at least at full price) they add credibility to their use of the authority principle. |
AuthorMark Anderson is a software developer, small business owner and pricing enthusiast. Archives
July 2016
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