Nikki Blog

Okay, so MeetNLunch has done the relatively easy bit of finding you a perfect date, but how do you do the hard bit in making sure you secure him once you have a chance to go on the date?

A really good looking female client of mine went on the date recently.  She is not just good looking, she is actually drop dead gorgeous, but the male client came back a little unimpressed. 

“….She did talk a lot about her work and i had to stop
her from going into details about each of the product
she is marketing for.  Still, she somehow managed to
explain to me in English mix with Thai about the
products as if she thinks that i would be interested
to learn about computers on a dinner date.  Aside from
trying to explain the product features, she also went
on into quite a detail about most of her previous
relationships and she seemed so proud to present to me
all the fancy job titles and upscale multinational
company that each and every single one of her previous
boyfriend used to hold or now holding.  She did put a
lot of emphasis as though she wants to make sure that
i understand that the number one quality she looks for
in men is “highly accomplishment”.  So i just smile
most of the time as she told the story….”

Dating Guidelines:

1) Don’t talk into too much detail about your work, only say something that is really interesting, and look out for signal that your audience may not be interested to hear about how the knot fell off the computer today.

2) Pick one language, and stick with it.  Don’t try to show off by mixing Thai with English.

3) Avoid talking about your ex-partners, if the subjects were brought up, don’t dwell on it for too long, and definitely do not brag about how great your ex were. 

Part of running a matchmaking company is to find a suitable and established location for our office.  Having known nothing about how serviced office industry operates in Thailand, it was a real surprise to see how aggressive the sales team are in this area.  Every agents are very competitive, very punctual, and very efficient.

I started googled serviced office and came across a whole range of websites, one of which is Instant Offices.  It seems to have a comprehensive database, so I submited my requests of location and number of people working.  The next morning, I had a call from Betty, an agent from Instant Offices based out of Australia, asking me for more details.  She then sent me a list of serviced offices to look at, all the location that I specified.  The list was rather overwhelming, so I put it away and promised myself that I will look at it next week.  But to my surprise, I started getting more calls from more office providers all around Bangkok.  None of them really hit the button though, until one company called and invited me to view their office and convinced me to make an appointment with them on the spot.  Somehow, all the agents that rang me up seems to be really interested in using MeetNLunch service too!

MeetNLunch is now located at :

After I decided to sign up though, another company called to ask who I decided to go ahead with.  The agent said she will call to check again after three months if I wanted to reconsider the location. Just incredible! Betty also called to make sure everything is sorted out okay. I guess Instant Office needs to find out who got the client in the end as they earn commission from landlords.

Only if all the industry providers are like this, we would have a very price competitive and efficient market.

“Dear K’Nikki,
 
If I were to compare you to a brand consultancy or even a branding guru…I would have to admit that you did such a brilliant job with your work. You did understand the needs and dreams of the client very well….”

What a compliment, I’m very flattered.  Thank you so much. 

Okay, so I’m finally back from attending a friend’s wedding, absolutely exhausted but thrilled for Mr. and Mrs. Puckey. Mrs. Puckey is my flat mate while I was a young and not so-wise student. They got married at a small village hall in Loughborough, the setting was very idealic on a beautiful day.  It was very private and very memorable, just how I like my wedding to be like.  The bride’s brother also gave an amazing speech, and which almost made me want to borrow him for my very own wedding.

I have three interviews lined up back to back this evening. Hopefully they will be all lovely to match.

Free magazines and newspapers are the hottest items in the coffee shop in 2008.  DailyXPress, part of the Nation group, launched this free midget tabloid size daily newspaper earlier this year, and had all the Bangkok journalists together in one room on that day. Despite the small size of the newspaper, the impact is huge, and can be felt by the other newspapers and magazines, paid and unpaid.   The “borrowed” and “repeated” articles in the DailyXPress are the same as the one we used to read in the Nation, but it is now easier to digest (in case you didn’t get it the first time you read else where).  But people don’t mind though, we Thai like the glaring orange banner and juicy news. 

The competition is fierce in the world of free news.  GURU and BK magazines were the prominent players in the free market in 2005-2006, until many other magazines such as Viva and TGI Friday follows suit.  As a reader, I felt quite overwhelm by the choices of what to read.  There doesn’t seems to be enough time to capture them, so reliability in the distribution plays a key role in what gets read. And as a sponsor to these magazines, I feel the market share has broken up into smaller pieces, and require me to carefully choose the magazines to invest in. This is also because the number of circulation quoted by them just doesn’t seems to add up to the total number of readers anymore. 

What’s the way forward for these free magazines? Will we visit the bubble burst like when there were too many magazines launched in 2004? 

Free magazines are a very lucrative business.  They earn a very profitable income from advertisements, (trust me I talked to the people running them.) Weekly magazines earns weekly income, daily magazines earns 7 times that weekly income!  But of course, advertisements cannot increase forever to support the run of so many new magazines. The existing magazines will need to be qualitative and consistent in its content and distribution channel.  As far as I can see, none has been able to achieve this standard, but it’s never too late.