LawsonGuru Blog

Entries categorized as ‘Lawson CUE’

Lars, You Need a Cause

June 24, 2009 · 2 Comments

I’ve recently noticed some interesting ads, focused on brand loyalty and awareness:

  • Tide’s Loads of Hope.  In a nutshell, Proctor & Gamble outfitted a truck with washers and dryers, and they deploy into areas affected by natural disasters, and people line up to do their laundry:

    What an awesome idea.  Think about it.  If you were one of those people, wouldn’t you become life-time Tide customer?

  • AT&T is undertaking an initiative to replace it’s vehicle fleet, with energy-efficient, American-made vehicles.
  • Wal-Mart is trying to repair its reputation of being an aggressively employee-unfriendly place to work. Part of its lower-price strategy over the years has translated into horrible public relations.  A new CEO is trying to fix that.  A recent advertisement pledges that Wal-Mart “won’t be 100% satisfied until every American has quality, affordable health coverage”.

In Marketing 101, we learned that these are examples of institutional advertising, intended to build awareness and generate goodwill, not to promote a particular product.  Which brings us to Lars, the animated avatar from Lawson.

Lars is cute and the videos are obviously well-produced.  But the message just isn’t compelling.   Lawson should be using this opportunity to tie their products into some meaningful community service; saving cats just seems so irrelevant.  Given our economic situation and all that we face, how about tackling a serious problem, like expanding into electronic health records (EHR), or tracking your carbon emissions?   Sure, it’s cool to have a mascot/avatar, but it needs to be more than just a cartoon.

Categories: Lawson · Lawson CUE · Thoughts

What’s Your VUE?

May 7, 2009 · 1 Comment

imageLawson has announced an interesting service offering, VUE ‘09, targeted at those of you who weren’t able to make it to their recent CUE ‘09 conference in San Diego.

(more…)

Categories: Lawson · Lawson CUE · Thoughts

CUE 09 Descends On San Diego

April 27, 2009 · 10 Comments

When Lawson CUE was held in San Diego this past April, Lawson invited some software industry bloggers to attend the annual event.  I’ll let you read their reviews:

Unlike the LawsonGuru Blog, which targets you—the actual Lawson customer, each of these bloggers targets the larger enterprise software marketplace.  But, hey, it’s Lawson’s conference, so they have to right to invite whomever they want.

Alas, I stayed home.

(more…)

Categories: ERP · Harry Debes · LWSN · Landmark · Lawson · Lawson CUE · Lawson M3 · Lawson S3

My Thoughts on CUE 2007

March 8, 2007 · 1 Comment

Even though I didn’t attend Lawson CUE this year in San Diego, I did receive my usual eyewitness reports.  I also viewed the video feeds of keynotes and listened in on the executive/analyst briefings.  And, naturally, I do have my opinions.

(more…)

Categories: Harry Debes · LWSN · Lawson CUE · Lawson M3 · Lawson S3

CUE 06: “9 on Your Mind?”

April 15, 2006 · 1 Comment

Even though I didn’t attend Lawson CUE this year in Orlando, I did get a number of eyewitness reports. I also viewed webcasts of the keynotes and listened in on a couple of the executive briefings.

(more…)

Categories: Harry Debes · Lawson CUE

Lawson’s Project Landmark

May 12, 2005 · 1 Comment

 The biggest news from Lawson CUE 2005 was the announcement of Project Landmark. This is the culmination of over three years of development, spearheaded by Richard Lawson, one of the founders of Lawson Software.

You’re probably asking yourself: “Just what is this Project Landmark and how does it affect me?” (more…)

Categories: Landmark · Lawson CUE