Passing It On: Blogpost- “Martian Headsets”

Thanks to Andy Sernovitz for referencing this post on his blog. It’s a lengthy anecdote, but it touches on so many important aspects of marketing (product design, product testing, product rollout, customer education, employee product education, employee empowerment, promotion, cannibalism, etc.) and it’s amazingly well written. Definitely worth the read.

Friday Favorites: March 10-14

Interactive for AEs- This is actually the first in a very interesting and practical series by Leigh Householder at Advergirl-her version of a “boot camp for teaching interactive to AEs.” I’ll be keeping these PDFs.

Lessons Learned from the Writer’s Strike- Melinda Krueger at E-mail Insider uses the writer’s strike as a great metaphor in reminding us that in our arsenal of digital tools (and the stressful situations that accompany their use) there is no replacement for high quality copywriting.

Borders Reducing its Borders- John Moore from Brand Autopsy blogs about Borders’ interesting new strategy. Be sure to click “FOR MORE” and “FOR EVEN MORE” at the bottom-nice complements to John’s post.

A Tool to Grasp that Elusive Customer Feedback?

This post by Wendy Piersall at Inspired Business Growth has had me thinking for almost two weeks now about customer feedback. You see, in my youthful idealism, my solution to grasping the elusive prize known as Customer Opinion is to simply to have a face-to-face conversation with all clients and customers, record insights gained, pass them around, evaluate, react (which includes doing nothing at times), and reevaluate. Sounds great, but how realistic is it to expect a face-to-face with every customer when evaluating service provision in a corporation like Wal-Mart? I think Wendy may have a solution.

My thoughts seemed to be reaffirmed this past week in a timely e-mail exchange I had with Ian McKee at Vocanic (blog, The Power of Influence). The question arose about the validity of the Net Promoter Score. For those unfamiliar, NPS is a services marketing evaluation that revolves around a single question: how likely are you to recommend this company to someone else? I had never been challenged to contemplate this question until Ian asked me straight out my thoughts on it. I’ve always respected the metric, but when I had to articulate an opinion about it, my response was that, unless I was for some reason bound to only a single diagnostic, NPS is simply too limited. Sure, one of the great things about NPS is that it encapsulates so many subjective opinions in a simple, quantitative score. But wouldn’t it be great to crack the shell of NPS and hear all of those individual, specific, subjective opinions?

Enter Twitter.

I’ll admit, this concept requires a lot of fleshing out, (I’d love to hear your comments on this), but I was wondering if somehow, Twitter could branch out into a {gasp} formal customer feedback tool? This is essentially what goes on now on Twitter, but in a random manner that is tough to monitor completely. I’m thinking some sort of Twitter console on site, or maybe a talk-to-text type thing so that people don’t have to put their groceries or doggie bags down to use a keyboard. At least provide a link to a Twitter “group” under the company’s name on a card or customer receipt so that people can go home and provide their subjective responses in a sentence, phrase, or whatever form of raw, unprocessed feedback they desire. Essentially, Twitter would simply be aggregating all of the blog posts and tweets people are already posting anyway into one place where company managers and other customers could see. Scary.

The beauty of Twitter is that it is conversation. It is essentially word of mouth. It’s real thoughts, not a scale from 1 to 10. It’s convenient. And it’s only 140 characters long-short enough that most people can endure responding and most managers can endure reading.

How could this idea be fleshed out some more? How could providing Twitter feedback be made to be ultra-convenient in such a scenario? How could responses be aggregated? What about moderation? How seriously could/should company managers take responders who execute ad hominem attacks on individual front-line service employees instead of commenting on the actual service experience? And what about Twitter purists who may see the commercial use of this form of social media as a sellout? Is something like this already out there? Twitterverse is a start-can it be adapted?

Steak and Shake, the Primer-Coated Car with the Loud Exhaust Pipe

As I have mentioned previously, one of my little hobbies is the “study” of high-end, high quality car audio. I’m not going to provide my defense in this post, but you can read it here. One thing that really annoys me when it comes to car audio (and it’s necessary body modifications) is when a person shells out very large amounts of cash on one aspect of modification but they leave the rest of the car in shambles. You can identify these cars easily. They are covered in primer and body filler, but have an annoyingly loud exhaust system. Or, they may be covered in dings, scratches, dents, etc., and ride on 22 inch wheels. It’s laughable, and a very amateur, sophomoric design decision.

Enter Steak and Shake. This restaurant chain is one of the most heavily branded, one of the most uniquely designed (speaking literally) restaurants out there. Steak and Shake has created for itself a very lucrative opportunity simply based on its physical design (metaphorically, its expensive exhaust system or its huge, chrome wheels). However, the marketing department seemed to have stopped there. They horribly underestimated the value of services marketing. Instead of bright, ambitious wait staff, they have tired, clueless hourly labor. Instead of value added service (hosts/hostesses getting the high chair for you rather than making the customer venture back to the bathrooms to retrieve one himself-this is basic stuff people!), they have a group of workers who congregate behind the half wall that separates the dining area from the kitchen (like we can’t see you?).

The heavy branding in each Steak and Shake would suggest the restaurant would offer the same style service you might find in a 50’s burger joint. No doubt, the company spent a great deal of money on each site’s bright lights, strategically laid tile floors, neon, and flashy colors. However, because the restaurant does not follow suit on the service side, this is money down the drain.

Steak and Shake forgot to brand its service employees-such a disappointing waste. Kind of like running Polk Momo speakers off of the factory radio and a discount-store amp.

(Caveat: I speak from repeated, compelling experiences at the Tulsa, Oklahoma Steak and Shake.)

Favorite Blog Posts March 3-7

How to Cure WhirlyBrand- Awesome post by Ed Roach at Small Business Branding. Definitely going into my Favorites. (Or as Ed may call them, “Favourites.”) I am amazed at the number of companies that have, as Ed calls it, a “whirlybrand.” Lengthy post, but worth the read. That crazy Canadian really know what he’s talking about! (But what’s up with “colours”?)

By the numbers or by the brands?- This post by Laura Ries at The Origin of Brands does a great job of explaining what’s going on (and what’s going wrong) with the Gap. Sad, but most likely true.

Customer Service - The Face of the Company- Great Services Marketing piece by Becky Carroll at Customers Rock.

Ideas are Overrated- The focus on people as much more than mere idea-generators, a concept well articulated in this post by Dustin Staiger at Casual Fridays, is essential to a strong internal marketing program. When employees know that they are valued by their company, they are inspired to value the company in return, and this value comes through in service provision. But when companies turn food tray liners into job applications, employees readily understand their place in the company in that situation too.

Passing It On: Video: Twitter in Plain English

I haven’t yet started started using Twitter-I am afraid of the stark reality surrounding the number of people who would (not) follow me-but I am really starting to see it as a useful services marketing tool-more about that later.

This video provides the best explanation of Twitter I’ve seen/read/heard. And it is so well done! Simple, creative, and effective. Thanks to Eric Eggertson at Common Sense PR for posting it.

Click here for the video.

And here’s my Twitter page

Passing It On: NerdTests.com

How does it tie into marketing? This is my personal brand! (literally)

Cool site. (Yep, I knew MN.)

I think the fact that I slightly modified the HTML provided to include this badge on my blog bumps my nerd score up a few more points.

Grant Thornton Gets Services Marketing

This morning, I saw a commercial for Grant Thornton. The tagline was something along the lines of, “See what it’s like to work with people who enjoy their jobs.” (I knew I should have written it down right then!) Of course, I don’t make nearly enough money to require the accounting services of Grant Thornton, but if I did, Grant Thornton would definitely be at the top of my list of prospects. I don’t see companies positioning themselves based on the personal investment and fulfillment their employees receive from performing the sometimes tedious tasks required of them by their clients. A potential client who is inclined to believe television commercials might be thinking, “if the employees are truly interested in what they’re doing, surely they’ll perform the services I require with great zeal and passion.”

Of course, the question must be asked, does this positioning attempt work for Grant Thornton? Despite my devotion to services marketing initiatives, I have to say probably not for Grant Thornton’s target audience. Honestly, when people are looking for an accounting firm, they don’t give a rip whether or not their accountants enjoy their jobs. Of course, I have not done any formal research or analysis on the issue, but my gut feeling is that most of Grant Thornton’s target audience client would likely take some sour bastard who has not made so much as a type-o in the past 15 years over an exuberant neophyte who proudly dons his Grant Thornton hockey jersey every weekend but who has been known to make a keystroke error or two.

So how could Grant Thornton position itself as a company heavy on effective internal marketing? Keep the broad-based advertising focused on skill and experience. The passion positioning should (will) come via word-of-mouth—you can’t just tell people that you’re an expert, you have to prove this. This is tough and takes patience. A clear brand-oriented internal marketing plan must be implemented and assessed, reimplemented and assessed, and so on. By “brand-oriented internal marketing plan,” I mean defined, intentional, differentiated service that is performed consistently. Social media initiatives that allow passionate experts in the company to have a public voice will help too.

This a very off-the-cuff assessment, and honestly, Grant Thornton may already be practicing some of this. What do you think? Should companies that focus on high finance position themselves as passionate? Either way, I’ve got to give kudos to Grant Thornton for being sensitive to the value of customer experience management in such a widely advertised way.

Passing It On: Real feedback when it matters

I recently ran across this video on Andy Sernovitz’s blog, “Damn, I Wish I ‘d Thought of That!” It provides just a glimpse of the effectiveness of employee empowerment-a key to successful services marketing and branded front-line service employees.

Click here to watch the video

Favorite Blog Posts February 25-29

NAFTA: North American Free Tag line Agreement?- Pretty funny post by Mark True at a blog I recently started following: Stories by REL. Of course, the humorous assertions Mark reports are a great reminder of the importance of true differentiation, even at the expense of exclusion.

The Many Challenges of Widgets- Interesting look a topic that has been growing in popularity for some time: widgets. This article by Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah does a nice job of taking an objective look at a trendy tool. Clip it in your Classics folder.

Backwards is the New Forwards- There has been a lot of talk about the Starbucks re-training. In my opinion, this post by Laura Ries at The Origin of Brands addresses it best.

The difference is our people? Seriously….duh!- Awesome post by Drew McLellan at Drew’s Marketing Minute. The idea that a “branded’ service employee goes well beyond one who simply provides good customer service is key to understanding and implementing differentiated service-the cornerstone of services marketing.