Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Mike Hohnen

Indian Pret a Manger?

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British Tiffinbites is a chain of Indian food outlets, which might well be the first real Indian fast food brand.

The company gets its name from the classic stacked metal boxes that are used to carry home-cooked Indian lunches. Tiffinbites has replaced tin with plastic, but aims to keep the traditional, home-cooked quality. Food is centrally prepared in North-London, using fresh ingredients and with a much lower fat and oil content than regular Indian take-outs.

Tiffinbites offers seated dining, but their neatly packed and stacked boxes are also practical for office workers, who can heat them in office microwaves. Tiffinbites currently has three outlets in London, all of which are attractively designed.

Springwise
Tiffinbites

mix your own flavors of ice cream in less than a minute

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Moobella is part of the whole web 2.0 craze hitting the net like crack in the 80’s but the only difference is that Moobella is not on the web, it’s a vending machine. Based out of Massachusetts, Moobella has made new technology in there vending machines that allows you to mix your own flavors of ice cream in less than a minute. The machine itself has a touch screen display that shows an assortment of flavors and mix ins available at that time. When a flavor runs out its taken down off the menu and the onboard computer sends a message to Moobella’s headquarters telling them that machine needs to be re-stocked with that particular flavor. The machine also sends sales data back to the headquarters wirelessly.

Moobella

Seen on PFSK

Nando's Limited Coca Cola Bottle for Freedom Day

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It is seldom that Coca Cola allows any agency the freedom to design outside the usual brand parameters, so when Nando’s was given the go ahead to brand a Coke bottle sleeve for this special occasion, their design agency Cross Colours was briefed to interpret Freedom Day, Coca Cola and Nando’s on the bottle sleeve.

adland

4 Steps to Spectacular Customer Service

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Most towns have at least one “flashpoint” business–a place that’s famous for its turbo-charged workers and lines of eager customers. These are the local hot spots that are “always jumping,” places in which employee motivation and customer satisfaction fuel each other in a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm.
But flashpoint businesses don’t just happen by lucky accident. They have to be made to happen. If there aren’t many such businesses, it can only be because so few owners and managers understand the simple four-step process for creating a flashpoint culture in their own workplaces.

msnbc.msn

Can Starbucks Blend into France?

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French coffee drinkers who have ventured into a Starbucks are clearly among the minority ready for something completely different. One of those breaking away from tradition is Martine Puis, a 25-year-old student at the Sorbonne university. “I usually order the most over-the-top drink I can,” says Puis, sitting at the packed Starbucks on the Boulevard Saint Germain sipping an iced caramel mocha topped with whipped cream. Conversely, the American and Asian tourists, who make up at least half of the clientele, opt for European drinks like espressos and cappuccinos.

Full article at:

businessweek

Think Different!

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Two things you know but don’t do

1. treat different products differently
2. treat different customers differently

1. why doesn’t fresh fish cost more than the same fish a day later? bowling a few cents less when it’s not so crowded? movie tickets more on the day a movie debuts? why don’t computers with a three-year obsolence cycle have predictable pricing that starts high and gets near cheap just before the new upgrades?

2. why do all of your customers pay the same price when they buy the same product?

There are a million reasons to keep things the way they were before it was easy to change them. And yes, we used to do things in a clumsy way, last minute discounts and early bird specials. But now that it is easy to change things all the time, have you tried?

More marketing inspiration from:

Seth Godin

Customers?

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I have, for the past few years, been using the following definition of a customer:

Anyone whose actions affect your results

I have found it to work in just about any situation. (It helps explain why vendors and employees are customers, too. Not to mention bankers and municipal authorities.)

Tom Peters

Happy workers, Higher shares

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A growing body of evidence points to the financial benefits of superior human capital management practices. Russell Investment Group has tracked the stock price performance of publicly quoted companies on Fortune’s 100-best list for several years, and its findings are persuasive. Someone who invested equal dollar amounts at the beginning of 2005 in the stock of publicly traded companies on the list would have ended the year up 12 percent, versus 4.93 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

Over the longer term, the link between a high-quality working environment and stock market success is even more compelling. Russell found that the 100-best portfolio, adjusted annually to reflect changes to the list from 1998 to 2005, provided an annualized return of 15 percent, versus 5 percent for the S&P 500.

European companies were also scrutinized to see if there was a correlation between good employment practices and a consistent margin of outperformance in the stock price. Russell showed that if an individual had invested £100, or $175, over five years in the publicly traded companies on the 2005 list of the best workplaces in Britain, this investment would have produced nearly double the return on investment than the FTSE all-share cumulative index, or £157.48 versus £83.48.

“Companies that devote resources to their human capital have a competitive advantage as a result of the high trust relationships between employees and management,” said Ann Watson, head of human resources at Russell. “This advantage manifests itself in higher levels of cooperation, greater commitment, lower employee turnover and improved customer support.”

IHT