“We’re a ‘yes’ company,” Build-a-Bear Workshop’s Chief Marketing Bear Teresa Kroll said during her keynote presentation at the North American Conference on Customer Management. “If you operate a company in that manner you will succeed. We live it every day.”
ComScore Networks, an Internet information provider, reported that online spending during the first 24 days of November reached $8.31 billion, a 23-percent increase versus the same days in 2005. Black Friday saw particularly high online sales—$434 million—up 42 percent versus last year.
Shoppers most likely are shifting their purchases online because of retailers’ investments in technology to streamline the shopping experience for added convenience and a less frustrating check-out. Sites are becoming more personalized and user friendly and shoppers are probably bailing out less during the check-out procedures.
To cite a few examples of outstanding online shopping experiences, I enlisted a few friends and colleagues to share a recent standout. Here’s who was top-of-mind:
Continue reading "What's Your Ultimate Online Shopping Experience?" »
Here's why every company needs to have a Chief Customer Officer, as discussed this week's 1to1 Weekly lead. A CCO puts an executive on the credibility case, regardless of what the pressures on that credibility might be. Credibility is different than advocacy. A customer advocate is an employee that acts with a positive customer experience in mind. So everyone should be a customer advocate. But credibility, to me, has to be considered with advertising, branding, images, communication and operations. Is a mortgage company credible when it extends loans to people who don't have the income to pay for them? Is a pharmaceutical company credible when it overprices drugs for senior citizens? Those are the issues a CCO needs to consider.
If you’re one of the many consumers who enjoy braving the frenzied crowds of Black Friday simply for the adrenaline rush, then shopping at Best Buy this Friday may not be the best choice.
The electronics chain is treating this pivotal shopping day seriously, taking measures to ensure customers will have an easy shopping experience. Last Saturday Best Buy stores nationwide held Black Friday practice rounds with its employees. Starting at 6 a.m., employees in many stores lined up outside to pose as customers. Others walked the line to inform them how to navigate the store. In some stores, employees even made mock purchases and cashiers practiced making point-of-sale offers.
Best Buy’s efforts to create an enjoyable Black Friday is partly the result of Wal-Mart making an aggressive push into electronics this holiday season. It's also partly because with many Circuit Cities located within a few miles, Best Buy has no choice but to make its stores attractive to consumers.
Whatever the reason may be, most of the early birds who plan to perch outside of a Best Buy this Friday will surely welcome a smooth shopping trip. And Best Buy will welcome those shoppers back in 2007 when they return again and again.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving and happy shopping!
Maybe it's a little less sexy than the current facination with brand co-creation, but I like the customer focus shown in our 1to1 Weekly story this week. Credit Suisse and American Express may not have a lot of MySpace friends or YouTube videos, but their branding speaks to customers in a language that all the stakeholders undertsand. "One Bank" shows a brand promise and a higher customer goal for Credit Suisse. Involving employees from the top to the bottom at Amex is a quiet but effective way of ensuring that the brand gets communicated and reinforced in every transactions. It's not brands screaming for attention. It's a little bit of welcome sanity.
According to Winston Wright, who heads marketing for Nokia’s Experience Centers and its stores, the company’s aim is to create guest-led experiences. “Never assume anything about the customer,” he said during a presentation at NACCM. “You need to ask questions to understand them and to lead them to where they [want] to go.” That is, to find the right product or service to fit their needs.
When I ask, “What’s Your ‘Good Customer’ Quotient?” I’m not asking how many good customers your company has. What I really want to know is whether you’re a good customer. I just spend a few days at the North American Conference on Customer Management, where the focus was of course on improving the customer experience to drive growth. One of the recurring themes was to hire people who are passionate about delivering stellar service. All the talk about employee behavior got me thinking about the other side of the equation: customer behavior. So I started observing.
In his autobiography, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton wrote, “The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.”
That’s exactly what Wal-Mart is doing this holiday shopping season. After launching a new fashionable apparel line in September called Metro 7, revenues fell short of Wall Street’s forecasts, leaving the chain’s executives to admit they’ve made some mistakes. Retail analysts said Wal-Mart frightened off its core customers—low-income consumers who frequent the store for everyday low prices.
Well it appears as if Wal-Mart is trying to win over its core group of customers again. It’s knocking back prices early and often and promoting holiday shopping to lure holiday shoppers. Its even promoting heavy discounts on high-end electronics like flat-panel televisions and MP3 players, potentially launching a price war between rivals like Best Buy and Circuit City.
Continue reading "Wal-Mart Seduces its Core Customers, but at What Expense?" »
Yesterday as I was walking through the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, I noticed a kiosk from the Star Tribune newspaper. It allowed people to search for jobs in the classifieds section. At first I was confused as to why this would be in the airport terminal, but then I realized how genius it was.
I've always held a little facination about airlines. Continental is among those that have managed to make some money and make its customers less miserable than most, as we point out in this week's 1to1 Weekly story. What facinates me, though, is why so many people in the customer strategy business love to talk about airlines. And the reason they do is because consultants use them so much and unfortunately they provide so much material for their presentations. Airlines are customer strategy gone wrong. When one of them gets it right, you're treated well, you depart and arrive on time and maybe you had an extra bag of peanuts. It's an incredible aligning of the planets.
Earlier this week I attended the Sage Customer Summit and while there had the pleasure of hearing a keynote presentation by Mrs. Fields Cookies founder Debbie Fields Rose. Not surprisingly for someone who turned a love of baking and sharing cookies into a multimillion-dollar business, Fields’ speech focused on what some might consider the “softer” side of business: offering an experience that makes customers and employees feel valued.
It’s often been said that customers are a company’s most powerful sales force. So it’s not surprising, then, that marketers are increasingly obsessed with inspiring word of mouth, creating communities, and measure Net Promoter Scores.
Creating brand awareness is no longer enough for marketers. Creating brand demand by engaging with prospects and creating loyalty is becoming the new paradigm for building profitable growth.
At the Ad-Tech New York conference this week marketing pundits toiled with not only the definition of engagement, but with how consumer-generated media is fast becoming the leading mechanism for engagement.
No one would argue that social media is fueling a growing number of engaged customers. Ze Frank, founder of zefrank.com, a videoblogger who receives thousands of clicks per week, knows about engagement. He recently challenged his audience to make an earth sandwich…and they did. Someone in Spain held a piece of bread to the ground at the same time as his counterpart in New Zealand knelt to the earth with bread in hand.
Continue reading "Earth Sandwich Builder, or Brand Ambassador?" »
"We should all take more risks in the marketing community," Tim Mahoney, SVP and CMO of Subaru, told last week's Conference Board Marketing Conference audience. That sentiment was also echoed by Carlson Marketing CEO Jim Schroer during his keynote. He explained that many marketers don't take the risks they know they should take because "it's too damn hard."
Politics, regardless of the progress reported in this week's 1to1 Weekly story, has a long way to go to reach anything like modern times. Face it, we use voting machines that can't even hang with cash registers. We have political campaigns that still rely on trashy ads and pressing the flesh when much more honorable strategies are available.
Did I say honorable? Sorry. Back to politics.
Political campaigns could cop some easy lessons from customer-centric companies. Stop the telemarketing. Leave the IVR machines off. Focus on events that disseminate honest and clear information. Use the internet wisely. Find your influencers and work them intelligently. Leave my inbox alone unless I ask you to send me stuff. And look at the process on Tuesday as one giant NetPromoter score: Would you recommend this candidate to a family member or friend?
There's a lot of buzz about customized multichannel communications, and for good reason. When done right, the results can be staggering. Regent Seven Seas Cruises, for example, mailed personalized letters to past cruisers--complete with a photo of the ship they had last traveled on and suggestions for new destinations based on their known preferences--connecting them with Regent's travel agent partners, and as a result generated a 40 percent lift in the targeted cruises. Nice. And Regent's not alone.
Companies aren’t the only business entities asking customers what they want. Today even musicians are creating customer engagement by asking for feedback.
Interactive marketing can be challenging because if you’re an international company, you don’t always see every consumer transaction. Event-based marketing, however, provides a way for consumers to experience the brand in person and possibly make a connection with a company, while the company has the chance to build its brand personality.
At Brown-Forman Beverages, which distributes a variety of beverages like Fetzer wines and Jack Daniel’s Whiskey, it's known that the brands are more important than the Brown family.
