Will Spanish business ever get the internet?

Anyone who has ever lived in Spain (or owned property there, or done business there, or even been on holiday there) will know that generally levels of customer service leave much to be desired. During my family's 8 years in Spain we have had all sorts of problems with all kinds of private sector organisation from the local shops to nation-wide corporations. Not only can service be slow and erratic but outright deception seems to be a common and accepted tactic among those employed to deal with the public.

This is hardly news but I would just like to comment another twist to this sorry record of bad service - the 'net hasn't changed much. On the surface of things Spanish business seems to have embraced the internet, not to the extent of the US or Northern Europe, but at least most reasonable sized businesses have a web presence and offer some options for online service. However dig below the surface, i.e. start making orders, enquiries, complaints etc online, and you will find that the same poor service culture exists online just the same as offline. Many times I have used an email for enquiries, quotes etc and not received a reply. The attitude seems to be 'out of sight, out of mind' and the online message is often. You need to get on the phone (if you can get a response there) or go down to see someone face to face.

As an example I needed 4 new tires for our car and decided to save money by getting a deal online (my local tire changing garage charges at least twice as much as they should). There are a lot of options once you do a search and I got what looked like a good deal from webneumaticos.es and all seemed well on the surface with automated payment, email confirmation etc I then arranged a garage to do the fitting again finding one with a website and all the trappings of modern service and communications. Without boring you with the details needless to say I soon got bogged down in a host of problems and it has taken me 2 weeks of chasing, unreturned phone calls and broken promises to get the job done.

Advoco has written before about how Spain can lift its economy out of recession and focused on a better deal for autonomos and employers. Maybe businesses need to start getting serious about service culture. It can be changed. Pre-Thatcher Britain used to be equally rubbish but now I would say most businesses are good on service because they have to be. Even in Spain I have noticed that Telefonica (or is it Movistar) seemed to have improved their previously appalling customer service record of late.

Related article at Advoco.es - 30 ways to market your business in Spain

Are brands as valuable as they say?

I decided to write my latest Alrroya.com article on brand valuations after reading a survey called The Top 100 Global Brands for 2010. It purported to show which global brands added the most profits for their owners and thus were the most valuable. Here are the top 21:

1 Google 2 IBM 3 Apple 4 Microsoft 5 Coke 6 McDonalds 7 Marlboro 8 China mobile 9 GE 10 Vodafone 11 ICBC Asia 12 HP 13 Walmart 14 Blackberry 15 Amazon 16 UPS 17 Tesco 18 Visa 19 Oracle 20 Verizon 21 SAP

The top UK brands were : 1. Vodafone 2. Tesco 3. HSBC 4. BP 5. Shell 6. O2 7. Barclays 8. Standard Chartered 9. Marks and Spencer 10. Smirnoff

Spain was represented by Movistar, BBVA, Santander and Zara.

I noted that 12 out of the top 21 were tech-related: computer/internet/mobile. Ever suspicious I began to have my doubts about the list with such concentration of names from one sector. For sure you would expect names like Google and Microsoft to be up there on the list but so many tech names had to be more than a coincidence.

Brands earn their keep by allowing their owners to charge a premium price for their product or service because they are highly thought, because they are perceived to be cool or simply because they are long-established and consumers feel comfortable with them (think Cadburys, Heinz). My suspicion is that the compilers of this list saw the high profits that these tech companies were making and put that down in large part to brand. But actually, in the technology arena, at least brand is actually less important. Why do you buy an iPod? Because it has an Apple logo on? No, because it is a clever, useful gadget. If Sony made a better one you'd buy that and Apple's profits would disappear. Same with Microsoft, no 4 on the list. It's actually not got that great a brand image and people buy their products because they practically have no choice.

When you move away from technology then brand becomes more genuinely important and you can't really argue with the high values given to such names as Coke, McDonalds and the luxury marques like Hermes. But hopefully the article will make people who read it a bit more wary of just accepting the claims of this report and others similar. We buy products and pay premium prices for lots of reasons and are not quite the unthinking slaves to branding that the marketing folks would have us believe. Here's my article:

http://english.alrroya.com/node/42045