Church of the Customer: November 2005 archives
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November 21, 2005
Zero tolerance for bad management
Why do companies behave badly? Bad management.
A Lawrence (Massachusetts) handyman has been invited back to Home Depot, just days after the retail giant banned him for a year for absent-mindedly leaving the store with a used 41-cent pencil.
The company also apologized for the incident that led to the ban, which it blamed on an overzealous store security guard who it said enforced its zero-tolerance shoplifting policy "to the T."
Michael E. Panorelli, 51, was shopping at the Methuen outlet on Thursday with George Salas, owner of Salas Auto Repair on Lawrence Street. Panorelli said that as he purchased $117 worth of lumber, he asked Salas for a pencil to write down some figures.
Salas took a carpenter's pencil from the cash register, and Panorelli said that, without thinking, he put the pencil in his pocket after using it. As they walked toward the parking lot, security guards approached them and accused Panorelli of stealing the pencil.
Panorelli had been forced to sign a written statement, which said he was "forbidden to enter into any and all premises of The Home Depot for a period of one year." It accused him of "the unlawful act of attempting to remove or removing goods or merchandise from one of our stores without paying for it."
A second document warned that civil charges could follow.
Any zero-tolerance program is defeatist. It categorizes human behavior into neat and tidy buckets that make no room for error or deviation. Machines can strive for 99.9999% accuracy but that's stretching the limits of engineering, especially if outside variables are involved.
To force employees into 100% compliance of anything is a sign that management that has given up on managing people. It says, "We do not trust you to make good decisions."
When it comes to customers, any type of company-first, zero-tolerance policy is a sign of rot within.
November 16, 2005
Blood as a cause
Blogger and consultant Sam Parker converted a blog post into a cause: The Global SalesBlood Drive, a worldwide blood drive he's organizing from Nov. 28 - Dec. 2.
The time to give blood is not when you're strapped to an emergency room gurney. Kudos to Sam for converting words into action.
November 15, 2005
inBubbleWrap
The fun folks at business bookseller 800-CEO-READ have just launched inBubbleWrap. It's like Woot. But for business stuff.
And unlike Woot, the stuff is all free.
Put your customer in your brand
Milk-Bone is making it possible for dog owners to create (and buy, of course) personalized Milk-Bone box holiday ornaments featuring their precious pup.
The company behind the idea is On the Package, which sent us the image at left featuring our blog mascot, Mini.
After a digital image is rendered to produce the ornament, customized coupons (digital and physical) can be created and sent to the customer. The customer brings the coupons with their dog's picture on them to the store, personalizing the in-store experience as well.
Company founder Dan Kiselik says consumer packaged goods companies should make it easy for customers to personalize their relationship with brands by putting customers' pictures right on the package.
On the Package joins other forward-thinking companies doing similar work: Jones Soda drinkers can customize a case of soda with their own pictures. The mass-customized beer with personalized packaging made by Australia's Brewtopia is now outselling the company's own Blowfly beer.
This dovetails with my recent post on moving customers up the loyalty ladder to ownership, helping customers feel that the brand is their brand. This is a good step. Next up for Kraft (owner of Milk-Bones): Allow customers to create personalized versions of actual Milk-Bone boxes!
Mercenary Citizen Marketer speaks
The "Mercenary Citizen Marketer" we wrote about yesterday says why she posted on eBay and what's happened since then.
November 14, 2005
The printed newspaper: Time to make it free
The past week, newspaper editors have been arguing their house isn't on fire while overall circulation figures go up in smoke and the nation's second-largest newspaper company quietly puts itself up for sale.
Keep the blinders on if you must, but traditional newspapering is quietly fading into irrelevance. Obscurity is the industry's biggest threat.
As we wrote about in the Big Moo, the market forces of competition and efficiency at their ultimate levels are pummeling punch-drunk and margin-heavy newspapers.
It's time to make daily print newspapers free.
Newspaper publishers fear free like passengers fear Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel of a car, but free is inevitable. Craigslist (free ads) and Monster (free to read) are eating newspapers' classified-ad business -- the most profitable portion of the newspaper business. Some 21 million blogs are leeching away the time and attention formerly spent devouring newspaper stories. In the past six years, NPR (free) has doubled its listenership to 26 million.
For years, the free news weeklies found in millions of coffee shops and street-corner boxes have stolen about $500 million of ad revenue every year from their daily competitors. The free weeklies make money because plenty of wealthy, well-educated people read them... free is their inducement.
Free works. Free reduces trial barriers. Free makes reading easy.
Free doesn't mean free delivery; dropping a newspaper at my front door is a value-added service for which I willingly pay the Wall Street Journal. And a subscription base is a permission asset that most newspapers obliviously ignore. And don't even think about introducing Ideo-like innovation at newspapers; that costs money!
But free newspapers in the nooks and crannies of cities, at train stations, coffee shops, street corners, supermarkets and at the thousands of Applebee's locations in rural America means it's easier to create a newspaper reading experience. The Chicago Tribune has experimented with this idea via its daily Red Eye tabloid. After initially charging 25 cents, the company decided recently to make it free. It's a start.
"Anyone who is so wedded to the paid circulation model is way, way, way out of touch," says John K. Hartman, a professor at Central Michigan University who is studying newspaper circulation. "I would compare them to the people standing alongside the presses when the first issue of USA Today came out. They were alternately raising each of their arms to hold their noses."
Free is a stench to most publishers but free is the future pathway to staying relevant in a world of democratized news and information.
November 13, 2005
Corporate evangelism vs. customer evangelism
In September, Vint Cerf left MCI to join Google. His new job title: Chief Internet Evangelist.
For someone commonly known as the Father of the Internet, Cerf's employment status is important news to a lot of people. Given his stature, his new job title probably caused a few double-takes.
Chief evangelist roles and corporate evangelism departments are increasingly common in the tech industry, less common everywhere else.
Is there a difference between a corporate evangelist and a customer evangelist and if so, where do the two intersect?
Glad you asked. Yes, there is a difference. By nature, they're cousins: part of the same family but with different parents. So to clear up some confusion over the concepts and their origins, let's clarify.
1. CORPORATE EVANGELISM
Guy Kawasaki popularized the idea of corporate evangelism in 1991 with Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or Ideas -- and Make a Difference -- Using Everyday Evangelism. Guy was part of the evangelism team at Apple Computer working to convince software developers to write applications for the nascent Mac platform.
In his book, Guy writes: "Mike Murray, the Macintosh Division director of marketing, first applied evangelism to Macintosh in 1983 when he created jobs for people he called 'software evangelists.' They were Apple's kamikazes who used fervor, zeal and anything else to convince software developers to create Macintosh products... They sold the Macintosh Dream."
With a comparison chart, Guy made it easy to understand the difference between traditional, in-your-face sales vs. a corporate evangelism approach:
Guy told us for our book that creating customer evangelists in the early days at Apple was "stumbled upon...We never thought it through that much. That's what happened, but that was not the plan." A customer evangelist -- not a software evangelist -- was an unintended benefit.
Corporate evangelism really took off when evangelist job titles started showing up inside technology companies. Today, Microsoft has hundreds of employees with an "evangelist"' title, the most well-known being Technical Evangelist Robert Scoble (who reports to a General Manager of Platform Evangelism).
2. CUSTOMER EVANGELISM
A customer evangelist not only buys your products or services but believes in them so much that she is compelled to spread the word and voluntarily recruit their friends and colleagues on your behalf.
These days, companies are including customer evangelism as a core company objective like we've never seen before. Results are not automatic by any means, but focusing on nurturing loyal customers who become part of a virtual marketing team can be key to a company's growth.
When we began researching Creating Customer Evangelists in 2001, a Google search for "customer evangelist" produced exactly two results; one was inside a technology assessment document and the other in a business article. Both were one-off references.
Back then, fissures in the effectiveness of mass media advertising effectiveness were first appearing, and we guessed that the impact of "customer evangelists" to describe the passion of extremely loyal customers could be profound. We were seeing it firsthand with the companies we had been working with and companies that were generating tremendous word of mouth. To us, the term was more succinct and emotionally powerful than "raving fans" or "brand advocates."
Our motivation was seeing far too many companies spend the bulk of their marketing work acquiring new customers instead of servicing their existing customers, even when existing customers were voluntarily spreading the word.
During the course of our investigations, we also found that customer evangelists aren't just buzz spreaders, influencers, sneezers, or mavens; they are, by nature, passionate people who are extroverted loyalists. To identify a customer evangelist among your ranks, it is someone who:
* Spreads the word
* Recruits new customers
* Helps you improve products and services
* Defends you
* Supports you
Today, three years after the publication of Creating Customer Evangelists, a Google search for "customer evangelist" produces 910,000 results. (We humbly submit that Creating Customer Evangelists popularized this term.)
Customer evangelism is the payoff for organizations that focus on the loyalty of their most passionate and demonstrative customers. But what does "loyal" mean?
For some, it's a repeat purchaser. For others, it's a customer who will make personal sacrifices to purchase your product. What's needed is an understanding of customer loyalty. Here's our take:
An effective loyalty strategy focuses on continually moving customers up the ladder toward evangelist and perhaps one day to that rarefied air of brand ownership. A formal evangelism department with product evangelists isn't required, but it certainly contributes to success.
One other trait that corporate evangelism and customer evangelism share: a well-defined cause. At its most profound, a well-defined cause changes the world. It inspires employees and customers alike to work toward a shared, world-changing objective, whatever that world happens to be.
The mercenary "citizen marketer" on eBay
A "citizen marketer" is offering him/herself on eBay.
For an entire year, this person promises to "...preach the sermon that your product is the be-all, end-all, one of a kind, can't live without product of the century. This campaign will include written ads, blog entries and a video ad to be displayed on the Internet or for broadcast on television. These strategies will ensure your company and product are never far from the thoughts of consumers."
The catch is: this person wants to be paid.
eBay bidder beware: Engaging mercenary citizen marketers in this type of stealth marketing will probably lead to an angry blogosphere pummeling your program.
Spreadable email newsletters
Blogs and podcasts are hot, but email is still the most frequently employed Internet marketing tactic. To maximize word of mouth, it's imperative that email newsletters are forward-worthy.
Peter Davidson of the BeConnected blog has a terrific series of posts on how to create a spreadable email newsletter.
November 11, 2005
Peter Drucker
Of all those who have waded into the waters of understanding, theorizing and explaining the nature of business, Peter Drucker was the greatest. The Mt. Rushmore of management theory.
My two favorite Drucker aphorisms:
* "The purpose of a business is to create a customer."
* "Business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation."
Peter Drucker, a Pioneer in Social and Management Theory, is Dead at 95.
