I recently read a terrific article about one journalist’s experience with Linked In. I’ll boil down the point of the article to this: There’s no point in signing up to be a part of a social networking website if you’re not actually going to be “social.”
He makes a good point. Some business networking sites offer numerous benefit that are, of course, only beneficial if you use them.
In today’s hyperconnected world, companies have little control of the information that moves around the Internet about their organization. One way to improve brand perception is by taking control of customers’ conversations and by making it easy for customers to talk in a public forum about an organization’s products.
In her book Beyond Buzz. The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Lois Kelly reminds us that marketing’s primary purpose is to help people understand organizations and products in ways that are meaningful to them. She says two overlooked ways to achieve this are by listening to customers and making them feel heard; and by making it easy and interesting for people to discuss ideas, issues, and points of view. Through these conversations, customers become more involved and becoming involved is the prerequisite to taking action.
I agree with Kelly about the importance of incorporating customer conversations into marketing, but I think that companies are starting to recognizie the effectiveness of this strategy. Some companies are currently using interactive multichannel marketing campaigns where actual customers can tell, in their own words, why they like the particular organization’s products.
• Take, for instance, Nikon. The company recently gave 200 residents of Georgetown, S.C., a new Nikon D-40 digital camera and they snapped photos of their friends, family, and the venues around town. Their stories, photos, and video testimonials can be viewed on www.stunningnikon.com/picturetown.
• At the Royal Bank of Canada, the organization has implemented a Client First strategy where the company has implemented new processes and has retrained the employees to focus on the customers. One of the resulting campaigns from that strategy is a series of webcasts and videos on www.rbc.com/clientstories that feature real customers giving their own point of view and experiences as to why RBC puts them first.
• Delta Airlines emerged from Chapter 11 in April and as part of its restructuring plan, the company is expanding service, adding amenities to coach, and reorganizing around the customer. Delta’s new “change” campaign invites travelers to give feedback on www.delta.com/change. The site will showcase tips and ideas from customers, and Delta says it will eventually become a collaborative forum for “honest dialogue between airline and air traveler,” a place where customers’ ideas will influence how the company operates.
• Blackberry is asking people why they love their Blackberry through ads and on the Internet. Customers can post their stories at www.blackberry.com/ask. Blackberry says the responses have been overwhelming. The site also features videos of high-profile customers—typically CEOs and founders of companies—who talk about why they love their Blackberries.
Have you seen a customer-driven marketing campaign? Share what you’ve seen here.
I'm not too impressed with what I hear and see from new AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. First off, he places all his bets on a rebranding campaign to make Cingular go away and AT&T louder. This on the eve of introducing a potentially huge product, the iPhone. I don't know what the iPhone does yet. But I do know AT&T is not a draw for me. I would be a little more information and customer-centric in the approach to the iPhone. Customer experience and then word-of-mouth will drive sales. Second, here's a scary quote from Stephenson: "We're going to control the video on our network. The content guys will have to make a deal with us." That's not a very democratic appraoch to technology and certainly not customer-centric. The Internet is about customer access. Rattling the corporate saber this early in the tenure shows me that Stephenson needs to go meet some of the people that will make or break his brand: His customers.
Today’s time-pressed consumers want speed with their service. Consider the following:
In most cases the last place employees who work weekdays want to be on Saturday is at a work-related function. Unless, of course, they work for a company whose culture creates employee loyalty and engagement -- the kind of engagement that spurs people, like Marty Peters of Detroit, to dedicate their life’s work as an employee (61 years, in Marty’s case). And spurs others, like Martin Joseph of New York, to give up their Saturday to volunteer at said company-hosted event.
A colleague of mine recently told me that she read about some well-known fast food restaurants serving “secret” menu items where customers can order off the menu at restaurants like Jamba Juice and In-N-Out Burger.
When I researched this concept, I found that the secret menu at In-N-Out Burger is not only an entry in Wikipedia, but it’s also displayed on the company’s Web site. “The secret Menu: urban myth, or just plain excellent customer service,” the site reads.
Continue reading "The Secret Menu: Just Plain Excellent Customer Service" »
In case you missed it, direct marketing service firm InfoUSA was excoriated on the front page of The New York Times on Sunday. The story detailed how InfoUSA customer data was twisted into customer segments such as "Elderly Opportunity Seekers," "Suffering Seniors," or "Oldies But Goodies." As it turned out the story was based on an investigation that was three years old, and closed. InfoUSA posted a detailed and effective rebuttal on its website. In short, InfoUSA was victimized here. But the issue of vulnerable customers won't go away. There are still plenty of instances of companies that prey on creating business opportunity from weak spots. Fortune Magazine, for example, goes to executives who are time crunched. So why do they have a negative option subscription renewal policy? That's the high end of the problem. At the low end, there are plenty of life insurance customers that will extend overpriced coverage plans to people who can't afford health insurance. There are legit financial service companies that will play on poor credit scores in the interest of opening one more account. Adding value to customers is not about exploiting weak points.
In today's issue of 1to1 Weekly, we discuss the strategy behind American Airlines' new Web site aimed at women. The company has also developed Web sites for the gay and hispanic communities. The idea is that the information is the same as on the standard American Airlines Web site, but the presentation makes all the difference to become more relevant and useful to customer groups. It's also interesting to note that differentiation online is a relatively new phenomenon.
Yesterday one of my colleagues and I were commiserating with each other about our daughters high expectations. Interestingly, both girls – although different ages (one is nine, the other is 18) – share a common attitude: When they’re “busy,” they’re not so interested in switching gears to have a conversation with us. But, when they want to spend time with us, they expect us to drop everything at that very instant and do their bidding (hang out, give them a ride, whatever).
Sound familiar?
I’m not talking about just other kids, here. No, no. I mean adult, paying customers. Think about it:
One of my expectations—and hopefully yours too—is that CRM technology vendors practice what they preach, strategy-wise. Sure, they have cool CRM tools, but have they crafted a smart customer strategy, and are they using their applications to support it? They should be, and customers should expect it. I mean, hey, would you want your car repaired by a mechanic who doesn’t drive?
Last week, JetBlue’s board of directors replaced its founder and CEO David Neeleman with the company’s COO David Barger.
The impassioned leader whose name is synonymous with the airline he started nine years ago, built an emotionally connected airline with a laser focus on the customer.
The change follows the February 14th disruption of JetBlue operations at Kennedy International Airport during a snow storm that left hundreds of passengers stranded for hours on airplanes sitting on tarmacs.
But customers' appreciation for the airline has already been sliding up, according to the New York Times, which reported last week that J. D. Power & Associates sees the airline's satisfaction scores climbing again.
This makes sense. I recently sat in a JetBlue terminal and was chatting with my fellow passengers. One man said because Neeleman immediately apologized after the storm, that made things right for him. The other passengers agreed.
Continue reading "JetBlue's Cautionary Move May Cost Customers" »
It's called "blogola." It's the practice of rewarding the right blogger at the right time for saying the right things about your product. According to a WSJ article today, it is the hot influence tactic at several TV networks. If you ask me it is the anti-customer strategy and the best way I've ever heard to stick an incendiary device into the whole concept of blogging. The beauty of blogs, from a customer strategy standpoint, is its unfiltered glimpse into what customers think. If companies start to pollute this resource, it's poisoning the well. The worst way to get customer feedback is to design surveys that tell you what you want to hear. The best way to wreck the blogosphere is to tell your customers what you want them to hear.
In an upcoming issue of 1to1 magazine we’re going to hold a microscope over the DNA of the customer-centric organization and dissect its leadership components. Through our various newsletter and magazine articles, we’ve seen some of these in action, like the ability to think strategically to build a win-win for company and customer, create consensus, and connect customer-focused metrics to hard-dollar metrics. We’ll be looking further into these and other areas. We’ll go out into the market and research what various leadership and organizational experts have to say about it all, but we’d also like you’re opinion. You’re the folks living customer centricity every day. So I ask, what do you think is the most important element of customer-centric leadership? What is that one skill, principle, or “attitude” a customer-focused manager cannot do without?
Earlier this week I received an email newsletter from SubscriberMail about email marketing best practices. The fun thing about it was that, in honor of Mother’s Day this weekend, the column was titled, “Email Marketing Advice From Mom,” and suggested that “marketers would be wise to apply some of mom's lessons to their email marketing efforts.”
Here’s a digest version of SubscriberMail's, er, “mom’s” 8 lessons:
In last week’s blog Got Brand Strategy, Tom West commented that companies can no longer force a brand on the marketplace—that they have to believe in their brands first. In another post, Graham Hill mentioned that in the old way of marketing, communications created brands.
Experiences do create brands, but marketers still must figure out how to leverage those rich social experiences on the Interent and build effective communications strategies around their findings.
In an interview this month in The McKinsey Quarterly, Keith Pardy, senior vice president of strategic marketing for Nokia, says that it’s not about pushing messaging out. Companies must instead build interesting relationships with customers. He says that the Internet plays a more important role in branding than ever before and that marketers have to get used to people shaping their brand via Internet marketing.
But as an industry, marketers, he said, haven’t yet figured out how to leverage the creative potential that lies in people talking on the Internet about companies. “Consumers on the Internet are open to interesting ideas and they want to co-create content with you, but make no mistake: They are in charge.
If Microsoft does buy Yahoo!, which has been rumored, it will do so by overpaying on a scale matched only by the Yankees and Roger Clemens. For Microsoft, it's a big deal because it will acquire what it could not build on its own, which is a scalable search business. But from the customer point of view it doesn't mean much. If you're a BtoB customer that buys search keywords, Google will still own your budget. If you're an average search user, I doubt that currenlty existing brands will move you to switch from your current engine of choice. But I do see one very interesting thing happening here. Search will continue to drive traffic and revenue. It will also continue to drive VC money. If a bunch of smart people can get in touch with what customers want from their secondary search engine (I'm declaring Google the primary winner) someone is going to write a new algorithm and make a lot of money.
In my experience at 1to1 Media, when the words branding and customer centricity come up, they're usually on opposite sides of customer strategy. Branding is meant to build general awareness, while customer-centricity, when done right, focuses on the needs of customer groups or individuals. At the recent Forrester Marketing Forum, however, three companies representing three different industries talked about tying the two themes together. Is it just talk, or can it happen?
Continue reading "Can Branding Lead to Customer Centricity?" »
A couple of weeks ago I rented a few (OK, well, five) movies from Blockbuster for a weekend movie marathon with my daughter (complete with popcorn, Coke, and Twizzlers, of course). They were all due the following week. Two days before the due date I received an automated call with a reminder to return the movies by that Thursday to avoid any charges. Wow. Blockbuster took proactive action to save me money – at the expense of the company adding to its coffers. The result?
Continue reading "Reactive Is “So Yesterday.” Proactive Service Is Now" »
Last week I attended a gala printing plant opening, complete with a plant tour, wine tasting (that included customized bottles of wine for each attendee, of course…), hors d’oeuvres, and two speakers. The host company, GDS, is among those trying to spread the gospel of using variable data printing to create more relevant, personal, one-to-one marketing communications. So GDS invited me to speak on trends in custom communications, and Tom Glick, CMO of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, to speak about the team’s VIP All Access program.
Glick’s was a great presentation, during which he revealed some of the strategy behind how the Nets are building a better understanding of its season ticket holders, and using that information in its marketing communications, as well as its in-arena fan experiences. The approach, launched this season by Nets CEO Brett Yormark, aims to deliver a “personal touch for all season ticket holders,” no matter where their seats are located in the arena. This means treating every season ticket holder as an individual by learning more about their specific needs and delivering experiences based on those needs. For example, if a season ticket holder has a favorite player the Nets will arrange for that player to sign an item of their choice (within a specified group of items, like a jersey or a ball) when they renew their tickets. Or the team may invite a season ticket holder’s child to take a shot on the court early before the game, or to rebound for the players.
In fact, creating a compelling customer experience is so important to the Nets that the team recently “acquired” Dashawnda Brown from the Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts to work with Glick in running the VIP All Access & Experience department. Brown brings expertise on high-end hospitality to the team that it will weave into its All Access program.
As Dick Martin says in his book Rebuilding Brand America, “Any cowboy with a hot iron can create a brand.”
Martin refers to a time when brands started as a signal of ownership. But today, successful branding is tied to emotional values. Brand, Martin says “has to be easy to understand and flexible enough to modulate in a wide variety of interactions with a large number of different audiences. Most important, it can’t simply be something you stick at the end of an ad or on the side of a building. It has to be the ‘golden thread’ that runs through every internal process and through every interactions with customers. And your promise can’t be primarily rational It has to operate on the deeper level of emotions and feelings.”
That brands that topped the 2007 Brand Keys Consumer Loyalty Engagement index http://www.brandkeys.com/awards/ are powerful because they make those connections. The index, which gauges the brands to which consumers are most loyal, determines the companies that are best able to engage consumers and create loyal customers through their brands.
If I ran a public company it would be deliciously tempting to chase the richest Wall Street market in history. In fact, you could argue that the CEO that doesn't chase this market isn't serving shareholders or the Board of Directors very well. But that temptation needs to be tempered by customer-centricity. Shareholders are people who stand to get rich from your company's share price. Customers are the people who will provide the value that pours the concrete for the foundation of shareholder potential. Customers are the gas in your Porsche. It's great that the 13,000 level on Wall Street is fueling some corporate value. But I would be very careful about the quality of that fuel: Customer value.
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