Church of the Customer: Marketing archives
August 16, 2010
Has your product jumped the shark?
From our good friend Tom Fishburne:
"In the rush to maintain momentum, there is huge pressure to "jump the shark." Jumping the shark attracts new attention and feels necessary in the game of competitive one-upmansship. But the volume of attention is far less important than the caliber of the attention. And more important than grabbing fresh attention is the maintaining of those already buying.
The risk of jumping the shark isn't getting eaten by the shark. It's leaving your loyalists behind."
More on Tom's take on jumping the shark here.
July 13, 2010
9 ways Groupon leads the online coupon industry
In the discount world, lowest price is king.
In the online discount coupon world, Groupon hopes to be king via customer service.
Since launching in November 2008, the Chicago-based deal-a-day website has sold over 7 million online coupons in 70 cities. Its success has spawned competitor sites such as LivingSocial, Townhog, and Homerun, and it's betting that fanatical customer service will keep them leading the pack.
During a recent trip to Chicago, I spent some time at Groupon's headquarters hoping to understand what makes this fast-growing company tick. What I found were the nine ways Groupon focuses on customer service in a price-competitive market:
- Promote the fine print. Groupon features terms and conditions in large type in a clearly labeled section right beside the deal highlights. You can't miss it.
- Put a phone number on every coupon. If you are at the location of the merchant and have any issues, you can call Groupon HQ to resolve them. Try to find the Amazon.com customer service number. I dare you.
- Anticipate and diffuse frustration. If you click to unsubscribe from Groupon's email alerts, you are taken to a web page with what looks like a live video feed of Derrick, the Groupon Guy. A button says "PUNISH DERRICK." Once clicked, a guy walks by and throws a drink in Derrick's face. A message appears saying "That was pretty mean. I hope you are happy. Want to make it up to Derrick?" Another button says "RESUBSCRIBE." Fun fact: "Derrick" is actually Groupon CEO Andrew Mason.
- Apologize. Groupon is fanatical about vetting good merchants, so when a merchant went out business after hundreds of coupons had been sold for it, Groupon gathered the entire team together holding a sign that said "We're sorry." They sent the picture, along with a refund, to all of the customers who had purchased a coupon.
- Have an iron-clad guarantee. If you are not happy with the Groupon experience, the company will refund your money, even if you have used the coupon. They call it "The Groupon Promise" and the company told me a very small percentage of customers ask for refunds.
- Let customers discuss your products on your property. Every Groupon deal has its own discussion thread in an online forum. Prospective customers can ask questions about the deal before they buy. The thread stays active forever so customers will often go back and add feedback about their experience with the merchant. No other competitor has this.
- Use two-way ratings. Groupon's success is predicated on happy customers and happy merchants. Customers can give awards to merchants that they like or flag a merchant for a poor experience. Merchants can also rate loyal customers or good tippers, and can flag unfriendly customers.
- Treat the call center as a customer loyalty touchpoint. Groupon customer service reps don't have scripts. There are no pre-set time limits on calls. Reps are trusted to solve a customer's issue on the first call.
- Hire for outside-the-box skills. About 70% of Groupon's customer service reps are connected to the local theater scene. Joe Harrow, Groupon's head of customer service says theater folks are a great fit. They are high energy, friendly, outgoing, quick on their toes and fun people. Plus, they need day jobs. On my recent visit to Groupon HQ, Joe showed me a wall in the customer service area decorated with pictures of team members. He mentioned that you can tell who the theater folks are by their professional head shots.
June 21, 2010
After the brainstorm
"As we return to the realties of our day jobs at the end of a brainstorm, we run into road blocks, inertia, committees and other hazards that can water down ideas or shut them down entirely. That's what organizations do well. They are designed to minimize risk. Bringing an idea to life can feel like making it through a circuitous maze. So much emphasis with innovation is placed on the up-front brainstorm, yet the real acid test is in the day-to-day shepherding of the idea through the organization..."
BONUS: Tom is the international managing director of Method by day and a business cartoonist by night. See more of Tom's work here.
June 16, 2010
Why a complaint is really a gift
At first blush, a complaining customer is not something we have on our wish list of awesome things in the world.
But this type of customer contact provides a great opportunity to do something remarkable that will build loyalty and word of mouth. Research shows this to be true. Customer experience research firm TARP finds that customers who complain and are satisfied are up to 8% more loyal than if they had no problem at all (PDF).
My experience with Adagio Teas is a great example of this principle. I recently lost the little plastic disk that sits under its IngenuiTEA pot. (Seriously, this teapot for loose leaf tea is super cool. Check out this video.) I couldn't find a replacement disk on their site and emailed them asking why I couldn't buy one. They said there was no way to buy one and that the disk was a nice to have but optional piece of the teapot. I pressed again saying that I prefer to have the disk and how could I get one of them. They offered to send me one for free. Nice! When I received their package, there were two disks plus a sample set of teas and a nice handwritten note.
This was my first interaction with the company as I had received the teapot as a gift. What started out as a complaint about not being able to buy the disk turned out to be an experience worth blogging about. Adagio went above and beyond sending the one disk, and created a more loyal customer who is impressed with their service. That's worth talking about.
BONUS READING: For more on this topic, see Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller's book "A Complaint is a Gift: Recovering Customer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong"
June 02, 2010
OGST visually explained
If you're a fan of OGST -- Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Tactics -- then this visual explainer that Paula Hansen of Chart Magic drew during my talk last month at the Social Commerce Summit is a handy way to explain it to colleagues.
May 20, 2010
Spreadability
For today's marketer, the real enemy is obscurity.
How do you build attention for your product, company or brand and rise above the marketplace noise?
One way is to make sure your web content is completely spreadable. Adding links for people to share your content on social networks and social media sites is pretty much mandatory. Remove all barriers so that customer evangelists can share your content and messages freely. Nothing new about this except that I found find this archaic message at the start of a B2B company's product video on their website.
Social networks are word of mouth jet streams. Your web content should be designed to ride them.
March 23, 2010
The DEVO method to creating a WOM-worthy panel
The panels at SXSW Interactive sucked.
That's what some of the record 13,000 attendees have been saying about the 2010 techfest. I heard it from many people I talked with at the conference, too.
Why?
Low-level content, lame speakers and bad panel moderators.
Of course, there were good panels, including the always entertaining Guy Kawasaki on Twitter tools and the informative Jaime Punishill on banking and social media.
But one panel really stood out: "DEVO, The Internet and You." Despite being late in the afternoon on the last day of the conference, it was the best panel I saw this year.
DEVO, the 80's avante-garde band, is releasing its first album in 20 years. The ironically brilliant marketing campaign for the album is to paint DEVO, which has always espoused the idea of "de-evolution," as a corporation. DEVO, Inc. plans to use "corporate" marketing strategies to promote itself, including focus groups, hiring an ad agency, crowdsourcing, Twitter, YouTube and even Chatroulette.
Here's DEVO member Gerald Casale explaining why DEVO needs to "rebrand" itself:
Then the panel turned into a brilliant piece of performance art. First, DEVO, Inc.'s COO Greg Scholl (hint: he's not real) shared a recorded communique with the audience.
Next, Bill Moulton, from DEVO's ad agency Mother Los Angeles, delivered a funny, deadpan PowerPoint presentation about the marketing campaign, illustrating the "power of the Internet!" and how DEVO will use it. Here's a snippet:
(Here's a pre-recorded version of the entire PowerPoint.)
Then Moulton showed how the band is using online focus groups for a "color study" to get data on what color people like, as well as in-person focus groups, poking fun at the typical corporate process of gathering feedback.
Finally, Jacob, a "research consultant" to Mother LA with an amorphous European accent, conducted a live focus group with the audience to gather even more data for its study, demonstrating the banality of focus groups.
The audience got the joke. One of the first questions from the crowd was: "You've leveraged a lot of synergies. Are there any synergies you haven't been able to leverage?"
The videos illustrate why this session was a lesson in making a panel interesting and fun. Here are the hints:
- A panel is a performance.
- Prepare, prepare, prepare.
- Involve the audience.
- Don't take yourself too seriously.
Think about the next panel you are organizing. Are you going to invite some experts and just wing it? Or will you think hard about sharing the same information as a performance that gets people thinking and talking?
UPDATE: DEVO Inc. COO Greg Scholl (again, not real) just sent the DEVO fan club email list a SXSW follow-up memo. And the performance continues...
February 23, 2010
Loyalty lessons from Lady Gaga
There's a lot marketers can learn from artist and musician Lady Gaga.
At age 23, Lady Gaga has rocketed to global fame in less than two years. Playing piano at age 4 and New York nightclubs at 14, she recently broke Billboard's record as the first artist to have her first five six singles reach number one. She's won two Grammys, and has sold 8 million albums and 15 million singles digitally worldwide. While her performance art-style stage shows and bizarre outfits have garnered much buzz, it's her loyalty marketing that may sustain her for years. Gaga is dedicated to her fans and clearly knows the elements of cultivating a community of evangelistic fans.
With that, here are my 5 lessons about building brand loyalty, Lady Gaga-style:
1. Give fans a name. Gaga doesn't like the word "fan" so she calls them her "Little Monsters," named after her album "The Fame Monster." She even tattooed "Little Monsters" on her arm and tweeted the pic to fans professing love for them. Now fans are getting their own Little Monster tattoos. By giving the group a formal name, it gives fans a way to refer to each other. Fans feel like they are joining a special club. (Related business examples: Maker's Mark Ambassadors and Fiskar's Fiskateers.)
2. Make it about something bigger than you. During her concert tour, Gaga recites a "Manifesto of Little Monsters" (text) (video). Although a bit cryptic, most Little Monsters see it as a dedication to them, that her fans have the power to make or break her. (Related business examples: Smoque BBQ (pdf).)
3. Develop shared symbols. The official Little Monster greeting is the outstretched "monster claw" hand. As all Little Monsters know, the clawed hand is part of the choreography in the video of her song "Bad Romance." Gaga tells the story of watching a fan in Boston greet another fan with the claw hand and that's when she knew this was the Little Monster symbol. Even Oprah knows the Little Monster greeting. Shared symbols allow fans to identify each other and connect. (Related business example: LIVESTRONG yellow wristbands.)
4. Make your customers feel like rock stars. One staple of Gaga's "Monster Ball" tour is to call a fan in the audience during the show. She dials the number onstage, the fan screams out, is located and they are put up on a big screen. While the rest of audience goes bananas, she invites the fan to have a drink with her after the show. (Related business example: eBay Live Conference where attendees walk through a gauntlet of applauding eBay staff as they enter the closing gala)
5. Leverage social media. Gaga has the requisite Facebook fan page (over 5 million fans) and Twitter ID (almost 3 million followers) but it's how she uses them that drives loyalty. On Twitter, she tells fans what she is doing, such as tweeting them before she opened the Grammy Awards. She also tweeted to fans that she was buying them pizza for waiting overnight at an album signing.
Some artists are very protective of their image and prohibit recording devices during performances. Gaga doesn't allow professional photographers into her concerts but is ok with fans recording and putting videos on YouTube.
Whether Gaga will have staying power remains to be seen. But she is making waves in the music business and teaching plenty of people the power of fandom.
Wouldn't you like to have fans like these?
UPDATE: To further illustrate Gaga loyalty, watch this fan-created created video card montage of Little Monsters from around the world for Gaga's 24th birthday. Many of the fans get emotional talking about how Gaga has inspired them to be themselves, and not care about what others think.
January 27, 2010
Simplify your objectives
Strategic objectives are the Holy Grail of a company's being. They typically involve big plans, so the natural inclination is to compose a lengthy description of each objective.
That means strategies and tactics are often piled into the wording of the objective. That unnecessarily complicates the objective, making it less likely to be understood quickly and efficiently. Anything not understood easily is unlikely to spread.
Here's a fictitious, slightly over-the-top example of what a top-heavy objective might look like:
Understand how to create better innovation opportunities for our products by listening closely to our customers' needs through a world-class community solution that deepens our customer relationships and helps customers share and collaborate together.
That's an unspreadable objective. It lacks clarity because it tries to say everything. It's loaded with strategies and solutions. It has a poor chance of blossoming because there's nothing simple to rally behind.
A strong objective is clear and concise like a headline. An objective is an intention, as my friend Stephen Harvill says when he helps companies clarify their thinking. A comparable example is when champion tennis player says simply, "I intend to win" before heading out to a court. How she'll win is through a series of strategies and tactics.
Therefore, to create a simple objective, strip away anything that looks like an action, a program or a piece of technology. Remove anything resembling buzzwords. Get to the soul of an intention, and make it simple.
Using that approach, the complicated objective above could be rewritten to say:
Innovate using customer feedback.
January 18, 2010
5 new ways to compete for book PR
(Editor's note: This is a guest post from Barbara Henricks of CaveHenricks, a public relations firm for business books and authors. She's considered by many to be one of the best book publicists in the publishing industry. She can be reached at barbara@cavehenricks.com.)
I’ve been in the PR business nearly 20 years, and there’s been more change the past two years than in the first 18.
That’s created much fear and confusion. Readers are consuming content from more outlets and with a staggering number of devices-- via iPhones, computers, Blackberries, Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers, to name a handful.
Getting a book published in 2010 is vastly different than in 2007. Advances are lower, editors are more wary of risk, print runs are shrinking, bookstores are ordering fewer copies, marketing dollars are tighter and publicists are chasing coverage in a media world that is undergoing its own transformation. That means authors today must master a new environment, relying on strategy, customization, and increased author participation.
Here are five ways for writers, authors and publishers to market in this new environment:
- A great media campaign will discard many if not all of the old notions, conventional wisdom and template approach of the past. There is no one blueprint for building a best seller. The best campaigns draw on all forms of media, with increased emphasis on digital forms. Campaigns today rely on the author’s participation beyond traditional tours and interviews. The best campaigns draw on an author’s natural strengths.
- There are no longer any magic bullets. No one single media hit can ensure a book’s meteoric rise to the top, with the possible exception of a full hour of “The Oprah Show” that features only one book, its ideas or the author.
- Magazine coverage is coming later and later, but now has the potential to prolong a book’s sales life. Not so long ago, if a magazine did not commit to coverage 3-4 months ahead of a book’s publication date, the process was over. Now, magazine editors will often take a look at finished books and post a review, an article or a bylined piece by the author in their online editions almost immediately. In some cases, if the online piece gets a lot of views, the magazine will run something in the print edition months after the book’s release, which will keep the sales alive well into the campaign.
- Bloggers are jumpstarting many successful media campaigns. For this to work, authors must be willing to become active participants – offering relevant content, contributing comments and connecting directly with bloggers themselves. It’s still the publicist’s job to do the legwork to guide authors through the vast landscape of bloggers, identifying a target group whose readership matches most closely with the book’s intended audience, but the author’s direct participation is required to make this outreach successful.
- Relationships will remain at the heart of good book promotion, but forming them will be more difficult than ever, particularly with the blog world. The best approach is good strategy – taking stories and ideas to a journalist only after very careful consideration of whether that book or message truly meets their needs. Repeatedly delivering only relevant material is the biggest relationship builder of all.
The landscape is different, the challenges new, but as always, big ideas and great books will will always find their way. As someone who cherishes her Kindle for its portability, must have the Sunday New York Times in its reassuringly weighty bundle, reads daily news online and cherishes her big glossy copy of Vogue, I know the industry will figure out how to integrate these formats into a successful mix.
Right now, it’s in flux.
