It might be more than just semantics. Disney Destinations Marketing has a new department:
Customer Managed Relationships
Here’s the quote from them that Tim shared with me, "CMR is our version of CRM – just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them."
Pretty good interview about recruiting and HR: Recruiters Hawking Dead-End Jobs May Want to Quit – Articles – ERE.
But first, the good news. Wendy shares the following note from LLBean:
Dear Customer,
During a recent visit to LLBean.com, you indicated that you’d like to receive email updates on products, sales and special offers. Because you previously expressed a preference not to receive our Email Newsletter, we want to ensure that it is welcome in your home.
Please confirm that you would like to subscribe to the Email Newsletter, either by replying to this email at LLBeanNewsletter@llbean.com or by clicking the link below. Thank you in advance for your response.
And then Mike takes us right back down and sends us the photo above. What about you, are you "non elite"?
Jay Grieves points out that average is a little deceptive.
Outliers can change everything. One Bill Gates raises the average net worth of people at a conference by a whole bunch. Or as Zig Ziglar says, one foot in ice water and one foot in nearly boiling water means that on average, you’re just fine.
The secret of thinking about average is to pick the right group. When you have a true bell curve, then you can start to figure out which slice you want.
Authentic storytelling, the lie that works best. Steve Strucely points us to: Nearly All Sodas Sales to Schools to End – Yahoo! News. What do the distributors get? Well, for starters, they make more money on a bottle of water than a Coke. Second, and far better, is they earn the goodwill and trust of an entire generation.
Okay, it’s true. In every category, in every profession, half the people are below average.
This matters to marketers.
It matters because if you expect your customers to be smarter than average, you’ve just lost half the potential market. It matters because if succeeding in a project requires exceptional effort, you better realize that not just any team member is going to make it work–actually less than half of the pool might.
Same with the consultants, designers and yes, lawyers that you hire.
Mass marketing works best when it assumes that everybody in the entire chain is just plain average. Or even a little bit less. Sorry to lower your expectations.
Niche marketing, on the other hand, can thrive if it starts with the assumption that average products by average people for average people is just not your thing. Remember, though, that your sales expectations have to be in line with your niche mantra. Be picky. Make great stuff. Work with amazing people. Just don’t expect everyone to love what you do.
Bill S. sends us this great example of misguided customer "service."
Why Don’t Ad Agencies Advertise? from Simon Sinek.
I’ll announce all the details next week, but I wanted to give you some advance notice. I’ll be doing a very small group whiteboard session in my office outside of NY on June 1, and a session for a slightly larger group in NYC on June 15th. Thanks to everyone who has written to cajole me into doing these. More soon.
Michael Dell could leave tomorrow and his company would do just fine.
Lee Raymond, retiring from ExxonMobil with $400 million, won’t affect the company much at all by leaving. (They might not even notice the missing cash…)
If Jeff Jarvis quit, though, all his readers and clients would notice. Immediately. He’s indispensable.
Before Tom Peters wrote The Brand Called You with Alan Webber at Fast Company, the idea that a single person would be much more than a convenient public face was considered a little nutty. Successful companies were big companies, big companies had assets and people were cogs.
Sure, there were the Lee Iacoccas and Victor Kiams and Frank Perdues, but generally, successful marketing and entrepreneurship was defined as building an enterprise bigger than you, an organization which made money while you slept, a company where you were, ahem, dispensable.
Five years later, it seems to have sort of snuck up on us. Now, there are tens of thousands of people out there where being "that" person is the career, is the business, is the next job. Not just micropreneurs and freelancers… but employees and experts and programmers as well.
What would it take to make yourself indispensable? Do you even want to be?
