Musings Of A Marketer

That’s a strange feeling - being neglected as a loyal customer…

Think of it this way: who you could be loyal to in your life? Your parents, your kids and your spouse. Your friends and your very best partners. Think of being neglected by them. Exaggeration? Not really: I may be exaggerating the customers’ feelings a bit, but not the way you as a business should treat this sort of situations. Never make people feel any close to this - there are too many businesses who will gladly take over your position.

There’s a great computer/electronics store here in Moscow, Sunrise. A very interesting self-service idea: you come over, order everything by yourself using one of the many computers inside. Get a slip to pay with, and after paying you pick up your order at a storeroom. This is a rough description, but I must say, basically, all is very well organised, and they save a lot of costs there, which positions them the best in the city in terms of procing - better even than Internet-shops.

Just recently I found myself nearby and bought an portable HD, and, separately, a rack for it. 2,5 inches drive, and, naturally, 2.5 inches rack… Coming home I find that the rack is 3.5, double check with the papers: 2.5. Ok, I have to go back, which I do. But they would not take it back, and the reason is… there is no serial number, and I cannot prove that I bought it from them, even though all papers are with me… I have to write an official letter, and their lawyers will reply… yeah, right… If you know these procedures in Russia, you rather kill yourself than start all this red tape. And all because of 10 bucks… No problem, I eat it. Just one good deed: I should write to the people from their website, just to help out: guys, you have a mistake - just change 2.5 to 3.5 in your online price list. Not so big a deal… 2 months have passed, no response, no reaction…

Over the last year I spent around 10,000 bucks there, buying stuff for myself and bringing my friends there… Can I hope for a better treatment? Can those 10 bucks be a way to mess it all up? No, not so much the 10 bucks, but their neglect - maybe. I know at least, that I will think twice now before I choose to order from that store again…

This is a very interesting phenomenon: some brands that have a specific emotional background tend to age together with their consumers. Many examples would come from cosmetics brands: these very often target various ages with various products. Soon as the audience is firmly up on your product you have to treat them with special care: people are the same but they are not the same people any longer. Communication must change respectively, and so must the product accompanied by that communication. Chanel #5 did a good job to come back, who else?

Something similar goes to brands in transition economies. These brands, however, grow old overnight. They do not just age with ageing audience but rather become outdated with new mentality coming in. Economies are set free, borders open and new strong brands with strong managerial expertise come to play. The “old” brands are just not able to compete, and the only connotative aspect that is left is the nostalgic emotions that people feel when hearing the brand name familiar from those “good old days when we were young”… This is the feeling that managers often appeal to when trying to revive their brands. But in most cases it’s a dead end - the audience is not as promising as the new wave…

Here below is a very interesting idea how to ornate a public toilet in a mall. This was implemented in Portugal. Allegedly, this is for a more lusty experience in a lavatory. Could be just a joke for fun. But here is an idea for an advertiser: dress those ladies in branded underwear, and a cool, fun advertising media is there for you

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing blog was sharing his idea about finding an ideal customer. Paradoxically, many companies feel much better by starting out with finding not-so-good customers. That’s an even better idea to me. You will think at least twice before sorting a client out of your preference list, and you will be sure in the end, that you have not just picked this or that customer because you felt like that, but rather you have had enough reasons to discard the worst customers, or reduce your efforts on working them out, in favour of those who you consider worth cooperating with…

I was posting about the problems one is likely to face when trying to contact for a prospective partner. A couple of months ago I was approached by Jon Lunetta of MyWaves Inc. He was exploring opportunities for connecting to Russian mobile service providers to arrange partnership programmes for their clients, with MyWaves’ technology platform. Since our TeriMobile company was already preparing for a shutdown, I compiled a small list of the industry players who had been most active by that time.

Just now, after 3 months, or maybe even more, Jon has come online again. None of the list would care to give any reply. I mean, hey, this guy is trying to get you in touch from over the ocean - how serious do you think he may be? I believe, pretty serious. If you are not interested - just be polite and say smth like “No, Thanks”. How hard can it be to type these two words? With the speed that mobile marketing industry is developing here (sloooow), I don’t think you have 5000 unread mails in your inbox…

A marketing dilemma from Seth Godin - which customer will you choose as preferred, and thus pay more attention and provide a better service: the one who is loyal and valuable or the one who you might turn into loyal.

Simple answer is that you cannot afford providing insufficient service. You can, and you must, treat people differently but none will settle for the worse. Should you have no nice table at your restaurant, let them have a special offer, a free drink, or whatever else. Should you have no nice rooms left at a hotel, there are tons of ways to make your guest feel special living in a less decent room etc. Many ways to improve the worse offer, many ways to lock a customer loyal and as many - to set him free to search for your competition. Choose one wisely…

A very interesting idea started up by Starbucks recently.

It is about crowdsourcing - the company has introduced a MyStarbucksIdea.com  website where you can register to share your ideas about just how the company could improve. The visitors can view the ideas by recent, popular and top all-time (which must be the same as popular I guess).

The registered users are encouraged to share their ideas and vote for already posted ones. Behind this are the Starbucks’ employees who are specialists in various fields, and they will respond to the advice - not directly to users but by acting, hopefully.

There’s also a blog page - called Ideas In Action - where the company will most probably describe the way they are acting on the advice received from the community. So far there are just a couple of posts - one welcoming by Howard Schultz, and one from Chris Bruzzo, where he wow-thanks the community participants and encourages them to keep on sharing.

This is a great way to get even deeper into communications with the customer community and have a better knowledge of their preferences. Crowdsourcing is a win-win for the parties, and Starbucks should keep their efforts on this site - more and better communication and, more importantly, show action to the community who take their time to share their knowledge…

If you are a boss, think this over: who is to blame at your company when something goes wrong, or something is done a wrong way? Is it an employee, his line manager, you - the boss, or the company?

If an employee is unskilled, careless, irresponsible - is it him/her or you to blame? How do you ensure that people at your company work their best? Will you let people learn from their mistakes, or you’d rather set the system so that they have already learned the lesson from the history, before they are put in a decision-making situation?

I used to have a boss who put all blame on anybody but himself/his company. The employees would learn from their experience, and got better and better with time. But soon as they had a chance (and believe me they would get a chance once in a while - ’cause the did learn a lot from their mistakes, and they would become valuable staff), they all left the company one by one. None is happy about feeling guilty all the time, even if it’s true every now and then…

I have just come across a video that we’ve made when working at TeriMobile. This was about our Bluetooth marketing platform - TeriZone. If interested, have a look, the videos aren’t so bad to describe the service at work.

Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online book was a guest writer at Mashable, with a summary of 10 factors to save your online reputation.

An interesting posting, worth reading. Very briefly, it goes like this:

1. Know your Achilles heel. Being aware of your weak points will help you be better prepared for attacks on you, if not save your brand completely and unaffectedly.

2. Assume that everything will make its way to the web. In our world of gtechnologies you can never be sure that anything you express aloud (by voice or in writing)will remain within yourself. So, you should always be careful about what you are saying or writing - always assume it will go public.

3. Create positive online impression. Good intuitive interface, with necessary content meeting expectations of your company, is a way to make a first impression on the audience online.

4. Choose your blog voice carefully. Note, that your corporate blog is not your personal blog. Let a team of employees manage it and fill it with content - their ideas, opinions and communications with the customers and perspectives. Corporate should be corporate (but do not make it completely impersonal).

5. Hang out at the right social network. Do not be driven by statistics to the most popular networks. Rather, find a network with more likely the audience that you target, the audience that talks, or is willing to talk, about you. The best way to target is creating your own network (will take time and efforts to promote, but in the end it will be your audience… and there are open source systems providing tools for creating networks from scratch).

6 . Send bloggers love letters, rather than PR pitches. Keep talking to the most influential bloggers on a constant basis. Agree with them, argue with them, comment on their posts. The more you talk to them, the more they are willing to talk to you. Next time they find fault with you, they might choose to talk to you first before publishing harsh criticism out loud.

7. Build your Google reputation now, not later. It will be much harder to improve your bad reputation than to creat one positive from the start. Once search engine spiders have indexed a negative article about you, it will be there, and who knows how fast you will be able to take it down and bring one positive up instead.

8. Monitor online reputation as often as email. Back to No.7 - do not let them have you caught on smth bad. As soon as smth appears on the web you have to be sure that you will respond promptly to reduce the impact.

9. Face the attackers. Ostriches are not a good example to follow - do not hide your head in the sand whenever you see an attack on your from a blogger. You might choose to wait a couple of days until the problem just goes away, resolves itself. But this is not necessarily going to happen. One of the attacking bloggers could be a Times journalist in the end, and you might become a hot news that very evening. Just face the problem, do something. Admit your fault if necessary, apologise, and take action to prevent further distress.

10. Three words to remember. SINCERITY, TRANSPARENCY, CONSISTENCY. I’ll just quote here:

Sincerity means wanting to hear from your customers and the desire to truly provide a positive experience with your company. Transparency involves tearing down the walls of corporate rhetoric and PR spin–the more you share with your customers the more you’ll win their trust. Consistency is a vital component for any reputation management efforts. Your customers will forgive your isolated failure, but if you’re not consistently living-up to your brand promise, they’ll find a company that does.

Great stuff from Andy Beal. If you liked it, you might wish to read his book - see the link up here in the beginning of the post.