Travel Thursday: Flying from US Border Cities

While I'm not necessarily an expert on the subject, I do closely follow airfares and deals, and am a big fan of checking US border city airfares against fares for flights from Canada. In fact, I was recently featured in this USA Today article on the subject:

With taxes, fees, and surcharges from Canadian airports, especially Toronto, being among the highest in the world, it often makes sense to fly from a place like Buffalo. Though there isn't nonstop service from Buffalo to a lot of US destinations, it's a particularly compelling option when direct flights are available. On the other hand, if I'm flying to a place like LA that has nonstop service from Toronto, I'm much more likely to fly from Canada.

My experience is that flights from Buffalo to any US destination are at least $100 less for a round trip than they are from Toronto, and that the ease of navigating through Buffalo airport (vs. Toronto Pearson) often means that it won't take any more time that it would from Toronto, even with the 1.5 hour drive from Toronto.

In order to save money, time, and aggravation, I'll continue to explore both Toronto and Buffalo options when traveling to US destinations.

Toy Tuesday: Barbie in the News - For Better or Worse

As always, Mattel and its Barbie product line are in the news, and as always, there’s a mix of positive and negative spin.

One of the very first product lines I ever worked on was The Barbie School Collection for Mattel Canada. It was a huge success at the time, and represented a real breakthrough in the “back to school” aisle with high quality TV-advertised product.

Barbie School Collection (Mattel Canada)

It’s good to see that Mattel Canada continues to run innovative promotions for Barbie, including their Barbie Academy that will be held next week in Toronto, featuring interactive stations that allow girls to "try on" different professions represented in the line including a surfer, veterinarian, race car driver, dentist, rock star and ballerina.

Barbie Academy (Mattel Canada, 2010)

Meanwhile, Business Week writes this month about Mattel’s foray into online sales direct to consumers, lauding the company for protecting its brand in an era where powerful retailers pose a rising threat with exclusive and private label products.

On the negative side, Baltimore’s ABC2 News presents a confusing report entitled “Black Barbie Sold For Less Than White Barbie”, in which they confuse a marked down black Teresa doll at an undisclosed Wal-Mart store with a full priced white Barbie doll. (For those who don’t know,Teresa is one of Barbie’s friends, and never sells as well as Barbie herself). The report outlines issues of “overcoming decades of racial and economic subordination”. It’s unfortunate that a marked down slow selling doll in one store causes this type of debate.

Marketing Monday: Banking by iPhone - Who Cares?

Most of the time when I see a TV commercial I can figure out the advertiser's objectives and strategy, but with CIBC's new commercials touting their iPhone app, I'm at a loss.

While Marketing 101 tells us that we should have a USP (unique selling proposition), CIBC's "the only Canadian bank to offer a mobile banking app for iPhone" may be unique, but I'm not sure that it's compelling.Who really wants to do their banking by mobile phone? Not me!

• It's difficult to find reliable statistics about iPhone penetration in Canada, but I'd be surprised if there are as many as 1 million users. Extrapolating from info provided by Rogers, the country's largest mobile provider, suggests that there may be even fewer.
• If someone doesn't have (or plan to have) an iPhone, would they think more favourably about CIBC because they are alone in offering mobile banking by iPhone?
• Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on prime-time TV advertising for a service that's likely to have such limited appeal?

This is one marketing program that presents me with more questions than answers, but maybe CIBC knows something that I don't.

Travel Thursday: Going the Distance to Save Money and Miles

Here's a simple but very useful tool for figuring point to point mileage (or kilometres). The Great Circle Mapper lets you enter two or more points, and it automatically provides distance between them. This is especially useful for figuring out frequent flyer mileage earning potential, or for pricing complicated round the world airfares with Star Alliance or oneworld.

It's not a tool that I use often, but it's sure helpful when I need it.

Web Wednesday: Life in Toronto

For a good selection of news about Toronto and beyond from a variety of different perspectives, I follow five RSS feeds, and they're required reading (or at least required skimming) for me every day:

1. The Star - reliable, predictable, and sometimes fun
2. The Globe and Mail - Toronto - some great content, but it's not updated as often as other sites, and the RSS feed doesn't provide good snapshots or summaries
3. National Post - Posted Toronto - a little off beat with points of view that are sometimes insightful and sometimes humourous
4. Toronto Life - a fascinating but often pretentious view of things that matter to some Torontonians
5. Torontoist - a slightly irreverant and somewhat quirky take on what's happening

RSS feeds that push content to my computer are very important for me to keep organized and on top of things. Don't know what is RSS? It delivers regularly changing web content (like this Playful Disposition) blog to whoever wants it! Read more about it here and let content come to you instead of looking for it yourself.

Toy Tuesday: Global Pricing -- Not in My Lifetime!

Richard Gottlieb, a toy industry veteran who writes the thought-provoking "Out of the Toy Box" blog for Playthings Magazine, asks "What is going to happen as consumers in various part of the world use their Internet connections to become savvy about retail prices around the world?" and wonders if the internet will ultimately force a sort of "global pricing".

As long as the world is made up of autonomous nations, I don't see global pricing or anything close to it happening in my lifetime.

Five reasons why:

1. Cost of running retail stores varies dramatically around the world. Wages, for example, are higher in Canada that they are in the US.

2. Countries like Canada and Sweden that have strong social welfare policies have higher taxes than places like China and the US, which ultimately impact product costs and in turn product prices.

3. Some markets (like the US) command economies of scale in everything from marketing to logistics, keeping costs and prices down compared to smaller markets like Canada.

4. Localization of some sort will always be necessary as long as people around the world speak different languages from each other.

5. Even if consumers can get better pricing from another country, the logistics and associated costs involved in moving products from one country to another are rarely worth the effort for the consumer.

Canadians are no strangers to shopping outside the country to look for better pricing. The term "cross border shopping" is a unique Canadian thing. If you ask any Canadian who has tried to order something online from a US retailer, you'll learn that many won't even ship across our border, and when they do, freight and duty charges mean that the "better" US price is no longer any better at all.

"Global pricing" is neither realistic nor desirable. Still, I'll continue to take advantage of deals I can get when I'm lucky enough to travel to places like the US and China.

Web Wednesdays: Creating Website Screenshots

Often, you want to save all or part of a webpage and the intuitive ways to do it (like "File/Save") don't get the job done. Here are some tips for easy ways to save images and more to your computer.


If you use Firefox, I highly recommend Screengrab! It's a Firefox add-on that lets you save visible part of window, the entire page, just a selection, or a particular frame of a webpage.

There are lots of other tools that also let you save screenshots. This list of 15 Ways To Create Website Screenshots shows you a lot of them.

Finally, when none of the tools seem to do the job, here's what I do:

1. On your keyboard, hit "Shift" and "Print Scrn"
2. Then do "Control C" to copy or "Edit/Copy"
3. Open a blank PowerPoint presentation
4. Do "Control V" to paste or "Edit/Paste"
5. Crop the image using PowerPoint's crop tool to get rid of extraneous junk.
6. Right click on the image in PowerPoint and select "Save as Picture".

Toy Tuesday: OK Go!

Today's Toy Tuesday entry reflects the interesting way that interesting stuff becomes a toy and can later take on a life of its own.Inventor Rube Goldberg's drawings depicted complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways and are now known as Rube Goldberg machines. One of the best known Rube Goldberg-like products ever is Milton Bradley's Mouse Trap Game, where players cooperate to build a complex mouse trap and then use the machine to trap their opponents' mouse-shaped game pieces. According to Wikipedia, "game designer Marvin Glass (and his company, Marvin Glass and Associates) refused to pay licensing fees or royalties to Rube Goldberg, despite Marvin acknowledging being inspired by Goldberg as well as the clear similarities between the game and a Goldberg drawing."

Today I received a Facebook post from Bill Goodwin of Goodwin Design Group with an incredible video that shows the idea of Rube Goldberg's contraptions taken to the next level. It demonstrates what can be done with an idea that's already proven to be great with adaptations that make it relevant and fun for today. Check it out here: This Too Shall Pass by OK Go.

Marketing Monday: Closing Ceremonies

As the Vancouver Olympics come to an end, it's likely that some of the great Olympics and Olympics-inspired advertising that's been running in Canada for the last few weeks will come to an end too. I recently wrote about official Vancouver Olympics merchandise and unauthorized "Olympics-inspired" merchandise. Some marketers have been active as official Olympic sponsors, while others have given us "winter sports competition inspired" advertising.

As someone who has done a lot of work on commercials for kids' products, I was very impressed with Wonder Bread's commercial and their accompanying website. They did a great job of making meaningful tie-ins with the Olympics and their product.

Wonder Bread commercial

Among the most patriotic Canadian commercials I've ever seen were some from a huge American multinational. Coca-Cola's commercials captured Olympic values and associated them with their brand.

Coca-Cola commercial

Air Canada's "Go Far" campaign has lots of Canadian spirit, and they've developed a campaign that has legs that will go beyond the Olympics.

Air Canada commercial

Of course, there are dozens of Olympic interlopers who don't have official sponsorship rights but have been capitalizing on the Olympics anyway. Interestingly, the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario), a government agency, is even doing it with in-store POP material and on their website:

LCBO website

Sad to see the Olympics end, but happy that the competition, entertainment, and even the marketing programs were around to show the great stuff that is Canada.