Just about everything in civilization works on the honor system.
No armed guards at the local grocery store, no pat down as you leave the library. Most people cross the street without fear of crazed hit and run assassins.
Great marketers are able to deliver customer service because they’re willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. They tend to take your word for it.
Of course there are bad actors. One out of a thousand people will cheat on that test or rip off that store. When LL Bean or Patagonia offers a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, some jerks decide to buy an outfit, go on a trip and then return it all.
If you spend all your time worrying about these folks, you end up underserving the other 99% of the population. Take the write off. That’s what successful marketers do.
When we move online, though, two things happen. First, word among the black hats spreads fast. One person starts ripping you off and suddenly it’s a hundred.
Worse, the ripoffs and bad actions can scale. Sure, only one in a thousand email users is a spammer. But one spammer, aided by a computer, can send a million or more emails in a day. Suddenly, the people who violate the honor system are able to drown out the good guys.
Just like the real world, though, if you spend all your time preparing for and defending against the black hats, you’ll never accomplish anything. If you assume that every single interaction online is fraudulent until proven otherwise, people will just move on to the competition.
So, online, you’re between a rock and a hard place. The first opportunity is to treat your friends better than ever, because word of mouth online is incredibly powerful. The Net brings significant leverage–you can spread ideas farther and faster.
The temptation is to embrace only the advantages of the web and insist on eternal vigilance against the possiblity of getting ripped off. To act as if everyone online is a criminal. To assume that the moment you are generous or trusting, squadrons of bad actors will exploit your generosity. I don’t think that’s the answer. If you treat people like criminals, the good ones will leave, because people have a choice.
There’s a different path. Awareness of the potential problem helps you keep your eyes open. You can watch the trends, be aware, but still embrace the honor system. Realize that the vast majority of your customers will always want to do the right thing. Look both ways before crossing the street… but still cross.
July 11, 2007
I’ve gotten a lot of email about: Sprint may cancel your service if you call customer service too often.
Apparently, about 1,000 people got this note. They weren’t delinquent in their bills, but they were calling in and complaining approximately 25 times a month.
If you’re going to be obsessed with delighting customers, it’s a lot more efficient to focus on customers that are able to be delighted. That sounds like a tautology, but it’s actually a guiding principle for successful businesses. Hire nice people and attract satisfiable, gabby customers. Why not?
These 1000 people were actually happy to be unhappy. They were unpleasable, and they weren’t helping either word of mouth or the ability of the call center folks to do good work.
I think the mistake Sprint made was in only giving people one day’s notice. I probably would have given them a month or so… Turns out Sprint even gave them one month’s notice.
What would happen if you fired (nicely) the very few customers that take your best effort but rarely appreciate it or spread the word?
July 10, 2007
Thanks for all of you who have asked for this. I’m trying a slightly different format, which should be interesting. I’ve found that most people who come to my sessions have read enough of my work to be up and running before they arrive, so I thought we’d just start at the end, with the Q&A.
September 6, in New York, all day Q&A and brainstorming session. I hope you can make it.
July 9, 2007
On Friday at 2 pm, I was standing in a small room, about 100 km outside of Delhi, talking with a young man who shared his home with a water buffalo. Less than 20 hours later (thanks to the miracles of 15-hour non-stop flights and many time zone changes) I was at the local Toyota dealer, watching the sales manager working hard to avoid talking to me (or even acknowledging my presence) about how they hadn’t finished servicing my car after a week.
Given the ubiquity of cell phones and the internet, outsourcing this gentleman and his three service consultants to India would be very easy. Instead of having people manning terminals in high-cost Rockland, NY, you’d have 10 people answering the phones (and inputting the same data) in India. More access for less money.
I have no doubt it would create savings. I’m also pretty sure it wouldn’t add much value.
It wouldn’t add value because reducing the cost of an interaction with a consumer isn’t usually the point. The real win is when a service person does the difficult work of solving problems and the essential work of connecting with people as individuals. You can’t outsource this easily.
You’ve heard it before: every single interaction is an opportunity to do marketing, not a chance to cut costs.
PS in addition to owning the water buffalo, the young man in India ran a micro-business in coordination with Drishtee, while others I worked with on my trip were part of Scojo and some other very cool organizations. If you bought the Big Moo, you’ve funded some of their work via Acumen.
If you’ve got more than one product or service, you have a problem. You need to decide if there’s going to be an architecture to the way you name things. General Motors has a division, Chevrolet. Chevrolet makes cars, and each car has a name (Corvette, Impala). They have an architecture in place that makes some things clear very quickly.
It’s easy for the brand managers at GM to figure out the steps to go through before naming a car. It’s easy for consumers to subconsciously figure out the hierarchy of how it all fits together.
This architecture isn’t a cure-all. Sometimes it leads to internal navel gazing that prevents great stuff from happening. (I remember sitting in long meetings at Spinnaker, where I was a brand manager in the 80s, arguing about what color the little logo banner should be on a particular product–teal meant educational, but siena meant family…)
The alternative, which is to make stuff up as you go along, can lead to chaos. Check out the chart of Apple products through the ages. Apple’s sloppiness has cost them millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements, not to mention making it hard for the team to keep up with the engineers.
First, Apple was a brand that modified a noun. Apple Computer, Apple II, Apple III. Then Macintosh was a brand that was modified by a brand that modified a noun. Apple Macintosh computer. Then Apple Mac IIfx computer, etc.
Then Apple was a brand that modified a brand that modified no noun at all. Apple Newton.
Then Apple modified its own subbrand by adding the letter "i" in front of it. Apple iMac.
Then they went back to the Newton strategy, with a twist: Apple iPod. The thing is, the "i" in Mac modified something we knew what it was (a Mac). But what’s a "pod"?
Wait, it gets a lot worse.
Now that Apple had two successful "i" products in a row, they got giddy and tried to own one of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Which you can’t do. So iHome isn’t made by Apple, but iLife is. The more equity Apple puts into the i, the more they waste, because others can just leverage it for free and people get confused.
Apple made the same mistake with the Powerbook (a third sub brand, the Apple, Macintosh, Powerbook laptop). They had to give up the word "Power" when they switched to the Intel chip from the PowerPC chip. A multi-billion dollar brand name, shredded.
Apple had to pay a million dollars for iphone.com, because the brand managers didn’t see it coming years ago. Same thing with Cisco’s phone. They even paid a million dollars for permission to use the word ‘classic’ for one of the Macs years ago. Did I mention the hassles with podcasting?
When a newer, more integrated version of the iPhone comes out, what do they call it?
My guess is that everyone waits to see what Steve likes.
It’s absolutely true to argue that a naming architecture is no replacement for amazing products that people choose to talk about. But if you’re going to pay all those lawyers and marketing suits to work on the names, they might as well be encouraged to lead, not to follow.
Brand names aren’t brands, not by a long shot. But they are valuable clues to consumers, as well as assets you own.
Word of mouth comes directly from expectations.
Low expectations are a terrific shortcut, because when you exceed them, people are so amazed that they can’t help but talk about it.
But low expectations are dangerous, because if you fly too low, you’re invisible. Worse, when people expect little of you, they often don’t bother listening at all.
So most of the time, you’re challenged with this: high expectations that must be beat.
Broadway shows. Apple products. Expensive consulting services. Promise big and deliver bigger seems to be the only reliable strategy.
July 8, 2007
Why all the hoopla about a date? (Marriages are up by 30% year on year for today over a similar Saturday last year, for example).
Simple. People are meaning machines. We look for hints about what the future will hold and add meaning, often where there is none.
Putting a lucky number on your marriage certificate is just as silly as all the other cues (from the typeface in the ad to the tie on the applicant’s neck) that we use to make decisions.
July 7, 2007
The staff and doctors at the LifeSpring hospital told me that they have to do exactly three things:
1. Realize that their customers* have expectations
2. Exceed those expectations
3. Do better at it every day
That’s as good a marketing plan as I’ve heard in a while.
*(notice that they didn’t say ‘patients’)
July 6, 2007
Politicians, social-cause marketers, health product marketers and others have a particular problem that makes marketing difficult: The closer an issue is to the purchaser, the easier it is to use it with impact. People care about a fire in their movie theatre, a lot less about one across the country. People care about an illness that they have right now, a lot less about preventing something twenty years from now. When you create gaps in time or space, people lose interest.
There’s another factor to consider as well: the consumer will be more motivated by something that she can have a direct influence on. Sure, every little bit helps, but every little bit is really difficult to market.
I was driving on the Taconic Parkway last week and noticed a Porsche Cayenne and a Ford Edge were keeping pace with me. I was driving my Prius and getting about 51 miles per gallon. The other two cars were averaging about 20 each. Here’s an analysis I just grabbed from a random website:
Even though I drive over 35,000 miles per year, a CX-7 would only save
me about $300 per year over an Explorer Limited V8 (with regular at
$2.40 and premium at $2,60). Even though the Edge will run on regular,
and probably achieve a bit better mileage than the CX-7, it would
probably only save me about $900 per year on fuel vs the Explorer
Limited V8. For someone who drives more typical distances, the annual
savings would be less than half those amounts.
Notice the lack of "times a million" math.
If we figure that the average driver in the US does 20,000 miles a year, I’m going to use about 400 gallons of gas. A car getting 20 mpg is going to use closer to a thousand gallons. Figure that there are about 100 million actively driven cars in the US, which means that the net difference if "everybody did it" has the potential to save 60 billion gallons (600 times 100 million) of gas. A year.
No, this isn’t a pitch to switch. It’s a pitch to describe how amazingly difficult it is to market that story.
The guy above who’s not going to switch from his Explorer to an Edge because it will only save him $300 a year is clearly not going to be interested (never mind moved) in the thought experiment above. It’s too distant. Too far away.
The same as the person who buys one of the million bottles of Fiji water sold every year. The same as the person who doesn’t want to know about a kid about to die… if the kid is thousands of miles away and it’s not clear how one person can make a difference right now. Here’s the thing: all marketers who whine about the distant do is annoy people. At least the people who don’t care about the distant. They don’t get "times a million" math, and repeating it with frequency isn’t going to help much.
The reason PETA has had good success railing against fur coats is that they make it personal. The same way faith healers bring an impact to a room.
The lesson of the National Lampoon cover above, the best magazine cover in history, should be obvious by now. The way to sell the distant is to make it immediate. The way to sell the drop in a bucket is to make the bucket a lot smaller, not to extrapolate to even bigger numbers. "Buy this car and we’ll kill 10 penguins" is a lot more powerful than "Buy this car and forty years from now, if everyone else buys a car like this one, your grandchildren are going to spit on your grave."
July 5, 2007
I got a lot of feedback from my post about reorganizing for profit. It broke down into several groups:
- non-retailers explaining why it would be impossible logistically to do this
- retailers explaining that making it hard to find related items actually helps them, because as you search around the store, it increases the chances you’ll find something you didn’t remember you were looking for
- high-end believers who insist that the salesperson will find what I want for me
- fashion hounds who insist that they buy the wrong size just to get a great label
and
5. retailers who have actually done this and regularly report increases in sales of 30%. (I heard from people who sell high end clothes, hardware and bikes).
Of course this won’t work for everyone. (Of course label-centric sport shopping is here to stay). And of course it’s doable (hey, you separate the men from the women from the kids already).
The most fascinating takeaway for me is this: many retailers believe that they still have the power to inconvenience shoppers as a way of increasing revenue. "Too many stores in that mall," in my opinion, for me to stay with you if it’s easier and more fun to go over there instead.
Test it first. If it doesn’t work, let me know.
July 3, 2007
