Loyalty marketing needs to go back to basics. I had two short experiences this week that demonstrated the power of customer service –and the lack thereof. It revealed a big gap in marketing designed more to target, than to retain customers. First stop, New York Times Square. Picking up some touristy items from a sidewalk vendor, I was amazed at how much time the seller took to find out exactly what I was looking for. Notwithstanding NYC’s reputation for impatience (yes, those ever-swearing cab drivers) this was a polite, no-pressure interaction.

This is a guy who probably doesn’t need to think about repeat purchases, brand image and loyalty programs. The way he conducted his transaction made me feel this could easily have been an experience one has at Macy’s or Banana Republic that trains people to follow certain steps in ‘delighting’ the customer and all that. His ‘store’ may move several times a week. His brand may not be tied to the traditional things like logos and url’s, and yet, this one individual left an indellible mark on what good marketing is all about: customer relationships.

By comparison, I accompanied my lawyer friend to a T-Mobile store in New Jersey to report the loss of a cellphone, get a new SIM card and see what he could do in the interim. Before that, a call to customer service was terribly unhelpful, because of a simple thing like a personal identification number. The person at the other end of the line could NOT (or would not) tell him if there had been any outgoing calls from his phone nless he remembered his PIN. (He had never used it and forgotten what it was).

The alternative was to log into T-Mobile’s site, create a password and check the phone activity online. Sounds nice in theory, in this everything-ought-to-be-online world. But there was a tiny problem. Logging in would generate a password that would be sent back to the customer on his phone. Never mind that it was lost! We tried several work arounds but the basic fact was this: the customer service person was not empowered to circumvent the guidelines. The only recourse was to drive down to the mall and get help at the store.

So what do you do with ‘customer care’ when the second part of that word is taken off the equation? l am a loyal T-Mobile customer, and truly like their offering. But it makes me wonder, what use is all the expensive branding, stores, and advertising, if the people who work for the organization, who are front and center of that brand identity, cannot do what a street vendor does? My friend’s ‘loyalty’ is certainly up for grabs. And don’t even get me started about the discounted price of phones that existing customers don’t get in most companies…

Continue reading →

I love PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. Sometimes it’s a lot like the telphone –both effective communication tool and absolute nuisance. Actually phones aren’t so addictive/seductive to corporate communicators. There is no style guide for having a conversation on a phone! Hands up all those who groan when someone launches a PPT file at a meeting, using a few slides that say nothing?

Everything today seems to get funneled through a PPT presentation, as if there is no other story-telling, employee-inspiring method of running a meeting. But that’s not my only complaint. It’s the fact that people spend inordinate amounts of time trying to ‘craft’ the thing, style guide in hand, aiming at the coolness factor, while forgetting the main thing: the recipient. To use the phone analogy, it’s like having to sit down and write up ‘talking points,’ polish the vocabulary, adjust the volume, and plan on intonation every time you dial a number to talk to someone.

Templates are useful, but they ought to be in the service of the message, not the other way around. Fellow IABC-er Jerry Stevenson once observed that PowerPoint

"has become the virtual cave
painting of modern office communication. Anything that is remotely
visual, and a few things that aren’t, ends up being slapped into
PowerPoint and sent around via e-mail or posted to Web sites."

Unless someone’s been been living under a rock (meaning an eighties-style intranet) he/she probably knows and uses other modern tools of communicating internally and externally.  PPT is a left over from the C and C (command and control, confusing and cocky) era, but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s use PPT effectively, and with purpose, but let’s get out of the paleolithic era, shall we?

Continue reading →

I came across* a thought-provoking observation from Bob Metcalfe in 1981 He said:

"There are two kinds of people in the data processing world: (1) those
who draw a box with lines coming out of it; and (2) those who draw a
line with boxes coming off of it. The former are computer-centric, the
latter network-centric."

The box-with-lines crowd, we meet everyday. They see the world through PowerPoint templates and org charts, and fit everything into templates. They’re not comfortable with, er, linking outside the template! The line-with-boxes people understand the value of networks, interaction, and don’t care where the next idea comes from, whether it’s from the programmer, the receptionist, or gleaned off the dust jacket of a book on someone’s desk.

One of the ideas of Metcalfe’s Law, ("the community value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users increase") as you may know, anticipated and probably seeded the idea for Web 2.0 applications such as Flikr, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube and more recently, WriteBoard, and NoteMesh.

I enjoy working with network-centric people. There’s hardly a day when someone from outside the org chart of my everyday work doesn’t ask, task, share, or collaborate. Without such inputs, marketers and communicators would be easily replaced by machines, or drones.

* The Metcalfe quote was in a very good article at MarketingProfs, by Roger von Oech.

Continue reading →

I have a saying that makes people pretty uncomfortable in marketing communications: If you’re  doing today what you’ve done one year ago, you’re in a rut. You’re not moving the needle. Your competitors are passing you by. 

To many of us, this may sound obvious, but if you look at what people are doing, and even how job descriptions are worded today, they look like they were written ten years ago. "Must be demonstrate strong writing skills, including writing biographies, press releases, PR letters, powerpoint presentations and edit newsletters."

My favorite, is of course the sentence somewhere below the line says ‘must be an out-of-the-box thinker’ that says, without any irony: ‘Must adhere to departmental, corporate, and strategic guidelines."

My point is that job descriptions need to march in tandem with the rapid movements in marketing and technology. Strike that. Job descriptions should leap ahead of what’s going on in marketing and tech. A few years ago Google, Del.icio.us, search engine optimization and RSS readers never existed. Even as we drool over the possibilities of YouTube, there are tools like MetaCafe coming over the horizon. In  Second Life (thanks to Steve Rubels link) over one million  people have registered. Some of these are big name companies such as Reuters and the BBC. Surely finance companies, universities, and hospitals will follow.

So, if we are not getting our feet wet in these realms, and still clinging to ‘collateral’ development and  writing the brand  guideline book, we are obviously  in a time warp. 

What are you doing today that you were not doing 365 days ago? 
 

Continue reading →

I occasionally give marketing people a quiz about taglines, and credit card lines may sound memorable, but are reallly confusing. I am a believer that taglines are a waste of time. Powerful ideas dont need taglines.

This ad for Discover, using scissors is based on a simple, very memorable idea. People are delighted to see an army of scissors marching into town and begin to feed them with credit cards they want to get rid of. The campaign is called ‘what if’ but it needs no tagline, for sure.

I’m no big fan of the 30-second TV commercial, and could argue why even this could be easily forgottten among the credit card clutter. The reason I single them out is because they allow us to think about whether advertisers spend too much of their resources on tag lines, and cool commercials. This alone will not make a brand more endearing. Check what’s happening to Apple’s reputation, in spite of its hyper cool advertising and branding. They are surely defending their core brand, but by suing podcasters, they are unraveling everything that their advertising has done.

Continue reading →

I’m on a mission to simplify. I want my hands-free to double up as earbuds for my MP3 player. I want my phone charger to also works as a laptop powercord, but with every gizmo, comes a power cord, or a docking station, and it’s time to simplify.

Mylo, which stands for ‘My life online’ is one device from Sony that seems to fit the bill. It will surely compete for beltspace among those who lug a phone, MP3 player, laptop and camera when on the road. It opens up the playing field for those interested in multi-media communications because it wraps wireless broadband around a device you could use to Skype, carry your music and podcasts, and of course, use for getting on the web. The smartphone on steroids? I like the sliding keyboard, with a QWERTY keypad. Also, as a longtime Sony user with a memory stick slot in my Vaio, I can see how easy it would be to save and transfer data from the Mylo.

On reducing cable clutter, there’s a solution from iGo. I particularly like the idea of being able to power a phone and a laptop with one cord. There’s an even cooler device, for using a phone to wirelessly project a presentation to any monitor in a room -via a Bluetoth link. It’s called the Pitch Duo. With all the latest travel restrictions, it’s one more reason to leave the laptop behind and simplify even more.

Continue reading →