Apr. 18, 2018 The Ladder: Elana Rosenfeld: Today I found this article in the Globe and Mail:
Elana Rosenfeld co-founded Kicking Horse Coffee in Invermere, B.C., roasting coffee in her garage in 1996. The company was well ahead of the curve by selling premium beans just as Starbucks was entering Canada and raising expectations for coffee drinkers.
Cheeky marketing helped the brand gain traction on grocery store shelves. Last May, Italian coffee giant Lavazza bought an 80 per cent stake in Kicking Horse, valuing the company at $215-million. Still based in Invermere, Rosenfeld remains at the helm.
Cheeky marketing helped the brand gain traction on grocery store shelves. Last May, Italian coffee giant Lavazza bought an 80 per cent stake in Kicking Horse, valuing the company at $215-million. Still based in Invermere, Rosenfeld remains at the helm.
I grew up in an entrepreneurial family in Toronto. My mom was actually in the gourmet food business. She started in the early ’70s, and opened up a gourmet food store in on Bloor Street across from Holt Renfrew. Then they went into manufacturing, selling to gourmet gift stores in the U.S., Canada even over to Europe.
In British Columbia, Invermere is a very beautiful place. When you move to a small town you really have to make it for yourself. The jobs aren’t provided.
We started with a fruit stand. Then we bought an existing smoothie bar and cafe. And then I tried to figure out what our area needed. We didn’t have a coffee roaster so we thought we’d give it a go.
Very early on we saw the momentum and the potential around our product. People were really connecting to our brand and the quality of the coffee. We introduced whole bean coffee when there wasn’t any or very little in the marketplace, and organic and fair trade coffee, which there wasn’t any in the marketplace.
Making the product organic and fair trade was really a no-brainer.
I did not go to business school. I was a religious-studies major and women’s-studies minor. Really my whole take on business is ethics and values and also creating the kind of world I want to see.
So it wasn’t really a question of price. It was just a question of it being the right thing to do. I like to buy organic. At the time I had a garden and I wouldn’t use herbicides and pesticides so why would I do that in my business?
The U.S. market is really quite different than the Canadian market. It’s like going to six or seven different countries and each region is vastly different. It’s just a much more complicated maze and a different distribution platform. It’s expensive to do business in the U.S. from Canada, so you need to be prepared to make that investment.
It was definitely a big shift for our organization [when I split up with my husband/co-founder Leo Johnson]. It wasn’t a negative impact but it certainly stalled progress for a short time, while we had to figure out our next move.
And then we brought in an equity investor, and that was definitely a great partnership that we had for five years. It moved the business from an entrepreneurial stage into a more structured organizational phase.
And then we brought in an equity investor, and that was definitely a great partnership that we had for five years. It moved the business from an entrepreneurial stage into a more structured organizational phase.
When the Lavazza deal was announced, the reaction in town was pretty funny. I remember walking around and I heard ‘ciao bella,’ ‘gratzie,’ ‘buongiorno.’ Lavazza is a very well known and respected brand. It’s been around since 1895. There was a fun curiosity to what that Italian element will bring to Kicking Horse and to our community.
My role hasn’t changed too much so far. Although we share many similarities in our philosophies, our brand is very different than the Lavazza brand. Our marketplace is a lot different. We plan on learning from each other, and Kicking Horse Coffee can benefit from its scale and expertise. I’ve started Italian lessons and I’ll be spending more time in Italy.
We still have a lot of work to do in North America. The U.S. market is still doing very well but there’s still a ton of opportunity. Believe it or not we still have a lot of work to do in Canada. There is still a lot of growth opportunity. Lavazza is in 90 different countries around the world and we are looking at those potential opportunities and seeing where our brand would be a good fit.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Apr. 25, 2018 "ASO specialist": Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:
Job: App Store optimization (ASO) specialist
The role: Similar to a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, only confined to the Google Play Store and Apple App Store environments, ASO specialists are responsible for landing their clients as close to the top of the results page in relevant searches as possible.
A relatively new discipline within the mobile marketing industry, ASO specialists can increase an app’s search ranking by adjusting the description, icon, video and image previews as well as other elements when presented in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
“It’s a lot of data analysis; you’re comparing the app with its peers,” explained Gary Yentin, chief executive and founder of Toronto-based mobile marketing agency App Promo.
“If you’re an application in the calendar space, you’re going to be mapping yourself against competitors in the calendar space, seeing what their keywords are, seeing how they rank, seeing what they wrote in their description, each of which is a data point you can use to evaluate your own application and hopefully increase its ranking.”
“If you’re an application in the calendar space, you’re going to be mapping yourself against competitors in the calendar space, seeing what their keywords are, seeing how they rank, seeing what they wrote in their description, each of which is a data point you can use to evaluate your own application and hopefully increase its ranking.”
While there are some Canadian firms that specialize in ASO services, the majority of the industry operates within larger mobile or digital marketing agencies.
Salary: As a specialty within the mobile marketing industry, ASO specialists typically command a higher than average salary. “It would probably start around $50,000 [a year] and it can go up to $150,000, but it’s based on what you bring to the table,” said Mr. Yentin, explaining that an employee’s results are very easy to measure.
“It’s driven by success, because you can show what you’ve achieved based on your campaigns. If they can show positive results they can [command a] higher salary.”
“It’s driven by success, because you can show what you’ve achieved based on your campaigns. If they can show positive results they can [command a] higher salary.”
Education: The Apple App Store and Google Play Store are themselves hardly older than 10 years, and ASO has only really become a stand-alone profession in the past three or four, Mr. Yentin said , meaning there are few formal standards and educational programs.
Instead, the industry typically requires practitioners to have a university-level education in either computer science or marketing, and some experience in either SEO or mobile marketing more generally. “The best training in this field is hands-on training,” Mr. Yentin said.
Job prospects: While there are few companies that only offer ASO services, many larger mobile marketing firms have incorporated the service in recent years.
“There’s a lot of technology, app development, app marketing companies in Canada, but the reality is to have a successful business you need to be global. There just isn’t enough business in ASO in Canada to sustain a company of three to five people,” Mr. Yentin said.
Mr. Yentin does, however, believe that career opportunities will only increase as practitioners further establish their services as a competitive necessity within the wider mobile marketing industry.
Challenges: There are two primary challenges that ASO specialists contend with, first and foremost being the gradual nature of the work. “People want to see instant results, and like SEO, ASO takes time,” Mr. Yentin said.
Another significant challenge, according to Mr. Yentin, is the ever-evolving arena in which ASO specialists work, as Apple and Google can make changes to their search algorithms at any time.
“You’re at their beck and call,” he said. “You really have to be up to date on what they’re doing … If you’re static in this environment, you’ll fail.”
Why they do it: ASO specialists typically have a passion for digital marketing and enjoy the added challenges that come with the confined space of the App Store and Play Store. “You can make small suggestions that have big results,” Mr. Yentin said. “It’s very rewarding to see how what you recommend produces results.”
Misconceptions: Mr. Yentin says many still confuse ASO and SEO, even within the digital marketing industry. Furthermore, he suggests many in the industry fail to appreciate how the practice differs from other roles that fall under the mobile marketing umbrella.
“It’s a specialty, you can’t just generalize it as mobile marketing, you need experience to do it,” Mr. Yentin said. “Saying any mobile marketer can do it is a misnomer; you need to earn your stripes by doing it on a regular basis.”
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