Informed customers make informed decisions and end up much happier with their purchases.
Onlines demos are so cheap and easy to put together that retailers have no excuse for not providing them.
Here is J and R’s Lunch and Learn schedule:
And here’s a brief show-and-tell recording.
Every time someone watches this is less time on the phone for a sale person explaining it. Self-service answers.
Who’s doing a great job of this? Leave a pointer in the comment section.
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Jay, you’re right: in fact, people don’t even buy educational courses without seeing a demo.
We sell a full-length SAT preparation course on video (www.DVDs4theSAT.com), and we’ve almost never had a sale without a customer first viewing our demos. On the potential downside, our demos show that we’re not a massive concern like Princeton Review or Kaplan. At the same time our demos reveal that we do have one of America’s best SAT tutors explaining what students need to boost scores on the SAT.
Jay – I’ll leave it for others to judge how well we are doing it, but LearnSomething has started focusing on providing customer education in the retail pharmacy and grocery world. If you go to the Sav-Mor Drug Stores Web site, for instance, at http://www.sav-mor.com/index.php, you will see a LearnSomethingAbout graphic – second one down the left side. This takes customers into a portal where they can learn more about the “problem states” associated with various consumer package goods and the range of solutions that might be available. The idea, as you say, is to help the consumer make better choices and ultimately have a better experience both with the retailer and with whatever products she ultimately chooses to buy. –Jeff
Hi Jay: As I shared on your Ning site recently, I’m preparing a presentation on the use of online video (mainly documentary style) for training.
I have a few examples (I’ll save the good ones for my presentation!):
CNET does this very well:
http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-cameras/canon-powershot-sd1100-is/4505-6501_7-32826175.html?tag=feed&part=rss&subj=video?tag=vid&autoplay=true#mgallery
So does Cisco but I hesitate to sign up with them again to take a look as I don’t want the email and mail I’ll get for registering. Sun does a good job of this too.
What I did find in my research is tremendous growth in online video learning sites for profit. Some of these sites are: blinkx.com; mindbites.com and howcast.com (“high quality instructional videos”).
Their model of small bites (“video tapas”) is one that will have an impact in the corporate world soon. I’ll be happy to see that!
Stacy Doolittle