Church of the Customer: July 2005 archives
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July 21, 2005
Hispanic BzzAgents
I recently posted about the prevalence of word of mouth in the Hispanic community vs. the general population.
And just last week, BzzAgent launched a Hispanic channel.
Savvy move, Dave.
AMD: what about customers?
Dustin Staiger from The People Brand says that AMD's very public fight against Intel is leaving out a rather important constituency: customers.
July 18, 2005
How profitable, really?
Question: When does it cost $20 to print an airline boarding pass?
Answer: When you stay at the Silver Spring, Maryland Hilton.
That's the cost to use a PC and a printer in the hotel's business center for 7 1/2 minutes. As I discovered when I used the center to print an airline boarding pass during a recent trip, Hilton charges by the minute.
But the printer refused to print my boarding pass, even from two different PCs. Very quickly, my credit card was dinged $20, sans boarding pass.
A hotel manager was gracious about my predicament and instructed the front desk clerk to print my boarding pass and refund my $20. When I asked him why the hotel charges a per-minute rate for using the business center, he said his hands were tied: it was corporate policy.
What a terrific way to disappoint one's best customers. How could smart and well-paid executives possibly think that $.69 per-minute charges to use a PC ($1.99 per minute to use a printer) would do anything but create a poor word-of-mouth experience? Is this level of nickel-and-diming worth the ire of countless customers?
Ironically, high-speed Internet in Hilton rooms is free. Welcome to bi-polar marketing.
Wonder what Kyle and Don over at the new Experience Journal Podcast would say about this customer experience?
July 17, 2005
Heard at the WOMMA Measurement conference
A few notes I captured during WOMMA's Measuring Word of Mouth conference this week in Chicago:
* Joe Pilotta, BIGresearch: Word of mouth is not about the distribution of messages; it's about how those messages are consumed.
* Ann Green, Millward Brown: It's important to look at the differences between buzz like Subservient Chicken and customer advocacy like that for JetBlue.
* Laurent Flores, CRM Metrix: B-to-B and B-to-C models will evolve to a C-to-C (consumer-to-consumer) model.
* David Godes, Harvard University: When customers talk about products, they are really talking about themselves. Products reflect our self-image.
* Matt McGlinn, BzzAgent: A product that is worth talking about has at least one of these characteristics: fun, unusual, sexy, exciting, undiscovered, shocking or engaging. Notice that "new" is not one of the characteristics.
Ben and I interviewed several conference presenters, whom we'll feature in our next two podcasts.
Southwest's new campaign
Southwest Airlines is emailing customers, asking for help to convince Congress that the Wright Amendment is odiously outdated. (The amendment was designed to keep Southwest from expanding at its home base of Dallas' Love Field.)
The campaign includes Set Love Free, a website for customers to lobby their congressional representatives directly via email. Not sure what to say? Southwest includes talking points.
Based on the considerable levels of customer goodwill it continually generates, Southwest is smart to ask customers for help in repealing an anti-competitive law that's loved only by Southwest's competitors and the operators of nearby D/FW Airport.
July 15, 2005
The Whole Foods marketing philosophy
Last year, Whole Foods spent $17.4 milllion on advertising. Advertising and marketing expenses were less than 0.5 percent of $3.9 billion in total revenue.
While competitors spend 10 times more in advertising (Safeway will spend $100 million on a year-long advertising campaign, including television product placements), Whole Foods dedicates its marketing dollars toward customer evangelism by trying to create word-of-mouth experiences. No TV stealth-marketing here, thank you.
Whole Foods isn't for everyone, especially budget-concious shoppers, but the company's strategy continually produces double-digit sales growth.
If we were to simply compare the two supermarket giants:
* Safeway: Spend money on ads telling customers we're great
* Whole Foods: Spend money on being great
[Tip of the hat to Brand Autopsy on the Whole Food story (free registration required).]
July 13, 2005
Looking at giveaways
Do bite-size chunk strategies of giving away some or all of your product work?
Jory Des Jardins of Fast Company examines three recent bite-size chunk efforts and asks myself and Jennifer Rice to assess their impact.
She offered bite-size-chunk efforts from Starbucks, TiVo and Skype. The quick assessment:
Starbucks: "Giving away" space in their stores (including bathroom usage) has been a dominant factor in the company's success.
TiVo: The company's promotion to give away DVRs to people who brought in Comcast cable bills was a gimmick that backfired when the company ran out of boxes.
Skype: The product is free when you use it to call others using Skype. Brilliant.
July 09, 2005
If only MTV had apologized
MTV was all the buzz this week, but for all the wrong reasons. Its coverage of Live 8 seemed universally derided as pitiful, horrible and a dismal failure.
MTV's biggest sin was frequent cutaways to its multitudinous "correspondents," who seemed to get more air-time than musical acts. MTV itself fielded more than 2,000 complaints during the original airing of the multi-country event.
At first defensive, MTV capitulated and smartly announced it would show five hours of "full musical sets" of artists without commercial and correspondent interruption. Smart move.
Then MTV commentator John Norris introduced MTV's five-hour coverage today by saying:
Due to an overwhelming response from our audience in the past week, who have told us they want to see full musical sets from their favorite artists from Live 8, MTV has assembled five hours of just that.
Norris was basically reading from the MTV press release. MTV did the right thing with the do-over, but it was the equivalent of a legal settlement in which the obviously guilty party pays a huge fine but makes no admission of guilt.
Can you imagine how much credibility if the network had simply said: "We screwed up. We thought we were doing the right thing, but everyone said we didn't. We're sorry. Here's five hours continuous hours of full musical sets shown the way we should have done it in the first place."
Apologies are credible.
July 08, 2005
How to create word of mouth at your funeral
When he was alive, James Henry Smith was a die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. When he died recently, he was still a die-hard Steelers fan and almost certainly generating a lot of buzz among his family and friends who couldn't help but appreciate his fitting exit.
His family asked the funeral home to erect a
small stage in a viewing room, and arrange furniture on it just like Smith's home on game day Sundays.
An Associated Press story picks up the funeral play-by-play:
Smith's body was on the recliner, his feet crossed and a remote in his hand. He wore black and gold silk pajamas, slippers and a robe. A pack of cigarettes and a beer were at his side, while a high-definition TV played a continuous loop of Steelers highlights.
I'm also a huuuuge Steelers fan -- One for the Thumb in '06! -- but would I go this far? Time will tell.
The value of podcasting
John Walkenbach says on his blog "I don't understand podcasts."
He raises a theoretical point: Are podcasts valuable? Referring specifically to our most recent podcast about marketing to women, John says:
Assume for a minute that I actually have an interest in marketing to women. I go to the site, and there's nothing to read. I have to download a 10 Mb MP3 file and devote 23 minutes to listening to it. Had it been a written article, I could have determined if it was worth reading in about five seconds. Then I could have read it all in about five minutes or less.
True. But what podcasts lack in rapid comprehension they make up for in portability, emotional context and overall tone.
A number of commenters to John's post argue that not everyone is like him; people who are unable to read, have reading disabilities or enjoy the multi-tasking ability podcasts provide -- like driving and listening -- outweigh podcasting's limitations, even for delivering information vs. entertainment.
The capabilities of podcasting are just beginning to be imagined. In the next year or so, we'll probably see creative entrepreneurs and smart technologists make it easy for podcasters to create hyperlinks to pre-defined cues in audio files, deliver on-the-fly closed captioning, automatic index creation, or full-text transcripts.
Those innovations will probably change the world of audio books, too. It's always fun to hear from a reader who prefers audio books to
written ones; they say audio books can open just as many doors of
insight and learning as written books do. It's the new-and-improved convergence.
Podcasting is very quickly flattening the broadcasting industry, and technology is sure to rush in and marry the needs of people like John, who want quick comprehension, to those of us who believe that podcasting trumps ASCII text in delivering short bursts of emotional impact and context.
What do you think -- what's the value of an information-driven podcast?
UPDATE: Mark Cuban writes: "Creating your own podcast and trying to make a business out of it is a mistake." Cuban has some experience in online audio content, having co-founded online streaming company Broadcast.com (later bought and shut down by Yahoo).
As in anything new, those who create strong word of mouth and convert it into evangelism typically have better outcomes than those who do not.
