Humor Elements

A lot of people when they read Reader’s Digest, first page they’d turn to is Laughter the Best Medicine, followed by Life’s Like That and All In a Day’s Work. After they are done with the humors and jokes, then only they peruse other serious topics or skip them entirely.

Many of us are fond of jokes, or contents that have humor elements. Adults need laughter to release tension, children simply laugh to express their happiness. That’s why talk shows, cartoons, comics and comedies have permanent markets. Even in courting, when you can make a woman laugh, half of the battle is over.

Commercials that have humor substances usually hit the right button, customers simply like you when you make them laugh.

For consumer products, we are not short of funny commercials, or witty print ads that are quite entertaining; but when it comes to industrial products, all these humor elements suddenly disappear. You flip through any industrial product magazines, all the words you can use to describe their ads and articles would be boring, plain, dull, dreary, monotonous and lifeless.

It is the same for industrial product tradeshows. From the brochures they distribute, the posters they display, and the backdrops they overhang; the pictures shown normally would be a direct shot of products that frequently carried plain taglines or no taglines at all, followed by some contents that are nothing but educative. And they expect you to be a quick learner, to learn everything on your brief stay at their booths. The only eye-catching item in the exhibition hall would be the sexy models hired to hand out marketing materials, or roaming the hall glamorously with placards.

I always believe industrial products needed to inject more humor elements in their sales and marketing materials, in order to bring a vivid image to their already uninteresting products.

When PC Mart, one of our active partners informed us that they will move to a new retail premises soon, we proposed placing a wall ad on one side of their external wall. They agreed but insisted on one of our humorous posters, which had the magnetism to “catch the eye”, according to them.  

Here I refresh some of our marketing works that have instilled humor elements. Sometimes I even think whether we should be extending the humor element to user manuals and other materials around the products or even the products itself.  To amuse in a right way – now, that’s a challenging task!

Integration

What is the proper word to describe the revolution of Information Technology?

A lot of people might find “digital” or “digitalization” well suited to explain the trend. I do agree, but “digitalization” is hard to be comprehended by the layman on how the 0 and 1 or bits and bytes did wonders for changing the world. I choose “integration” as the single word that clearly shows the changes.

Integration

When PCs invaded offices in the late 80s, some different types of works used to handle by different people, later consolidated to be managed by a lesser few.  For example, typist is a bygone job. Why need a typist when you can write on your own PC?  For the newspaper industry in the pro-PC era, typesetters used to typeset titles in different typefaces and font size, and contents in smaller point size, and later pass their work to designers to cut and paste with the related photos to construct full pages - but now things have changed as sub-editors took over the task of paginating a whole page.

When PCs were introduced, some workflows were fast to become redundant. The multi-tasking of PCs and transferable of data destroyed plenty of old rules and joined many related professions together. It made the used-to-be natural workflow become unnatural, and started a reformation based on the integration of jobs.

Later when the Internet connected every PC in the world to become one giant web network, the norm of integration was more apparent.  A lot of small merchants saw the opportunity and forayed online; but to succeed, they have to show how good their integration ability is. Because to open a brick and mortar store you’ll need money and some intelligence, but to open an online store, you need money with much more intelligence. The complexity to integrate the sales of tangible products in an intangible system sometimes is beyond comprehension.

Integration

When cloud-computing started becoming the megatrend, the complexity of the integration level is at all heights - customers, billing, payment, sales & marketing, technical support, products & applications, admin & control, etc., are all intertwined. The biggest challenge for the vendor is keeping the complexity behind doors, and displaying the simplicity up front. 

And finally, our TimeTec Cloud is making a debut for customers to try after we opened for resellers to register in July.  I use this single word, “integration” to conclude our three months of hardwork, and brain-straining labors. And yet we can’t expect any congratulatory flower basket delivered to our storefront; to hope for the glitches to be reduced to a very minimum is good enough.

While all integration efforts go to TimeTec Cloud, another integration task is turned on: consolidating the FingerTec USA website into FingerTec main portal, as a move to promote the effective share of online resources.

I expect further collaboration with our partners to integrate websites around the world of theirs into ours by next year. 

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ