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Entries categorized as ‘customer service’

Why the recession could be good for business

Monday 13 October 2008 · No Comments

Today the UK government has called time on the excesses, self interest and downright bad management of the financial services sector, by taking control of British banks.  Whether it will have the desired effect remains to be seen, but frankly, its about time.  I lost patience with the sector a while back, when a leading FS manager told me that it wasn’t in his interest to “put customers first” and now we are witnessing the product of this mind-set.

I’m not a fan of this government, but it does seem that they’ve got this right and for once I feel the Britain is looking bold and decisive.  UK Gov’s move may not produce a level playing field, but hopefully it will create a more sensible game, however the fall-out is sure to continue with customers far from relaxed about choosing financial patners. And that’s where the potential is.  Ultimately, the banks and financial institutions that are first to persuade consumers and businesses that they can be trusted will triumph.

Trust, is the very basis of any Brandship - the relationships between brands and their stakeholders - so its easy to see that, given the revelations of the last few weeks, the brand equity of banks is as low as a limbo-dancing gnome.  For now they are all tarred with the same brush.  We all know now that for years banks have been tricking us into believing that they were on our side while craftily lining their own pockets with our cash, so for any financial services business to dig themselves out of this one is a big ask.  However, that’s the challenge they all face and its clear that the same old, same old just isn’t going to cut it.  This time they have to be transparent and build brands with real integrity.  Attempting this feat with their existing management in place would be like a paedophile applying for a job as a kids’ swimming instructor, and that’s why the government stepping into the management shoes will, at least, give a few of them a chance.  Now its a case of a massive change management process and that can only be good for business.  Who’ll be first to the tape.

While the banks are working on this one, the rest of the commercial world are considering how they can survive the after shock.  There’s no doubt about it, a lot of businesses are going to tumble in the next few months, but amid the rubble there’s a real opportunity for the bold.

As we’ve seen with banks in the US and UK, there are always bigger vultures to pick over the bones of the those that fail and in this vein a good many short-term wins will be had by organisations with strong and inviting brand communities that can offer shelter to the customers of their deceased competitors.  This will come about in two ways - pro-active, acquisition by competitors and investors of organisations and brands on the verge of a crash and reactive, mopping up by strong brands of the displaced customers of their weaker competitors.

But moreso than in the normal process of acquisition the challenge doesn’t end acquisition.  Its one thing to provide a consumer with temporary shelter, but although the cost of acquisition could be modest compared to the recent past, the real test will be whether these brands can persuade their new customers to make a home with them.  This is where I see the real potential.  I foresee a period of floating customers, like deserted wives, reluctant to commit to long-term relationships and suitor brands falling over themselves to reel them in and turn them into life-partners.  And I predict, honesty will prevail.  If nothing else worthwhile comes of this situation I be live it will convince a few more brands to stop making empty-promises and a shift to genuineness, transparency and a genuine commitment to customer satisfaction.  Another reason why the recession will be good for business.

Because brand communities are a product of their members - significantly their customers - any acquisitive organisations will also have to be wary of the risk of alienating their existing customers as the dynamic of their brand is changed by a large influx of new members, but, if they are sufficiently sorted to have created a strong enough brand community to pull off the acquisition trick in the first place the chances are they’ll have this under control too.

Its common practice in recessionary times for organisations to tighten their belts and sit it out, but the record clearly shows that this is not the path to success and it definitely isn’t the way to go now.  If you want to to make the most of the opportunities that the recession is providing you need to be pro-active, take a close look at your brand and your organisation.  Are you in shape to meet the challenge?  If not get to work.  At the end of this recession the organisations that deserve success will have it and there’ll be some gaps in the line up too.  But then again, I’ve always felt that Darwin nailed it with the process of natural selection.   I think we’ll all be better off for the clear out.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Competitors · Darwin · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · bankers · banks · brand · brand development · brand name · branding · brands · business development · business strategy · change management · community · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · natural selection · opportunity · phil darby · promise · recession · strategy · transparency

Is your customer satisfaction holed beneath the surface? It’s that Icberg Imperative again!

Tuesday 24 June 2008 · No Comments

I just landed on a great little blog that I visit from time to time called Customers Rock. In particular a new post entitled Airline Customer Service Makes All The Difference. Its not that we don’t all know this already, but that it relates to my previous post on internal marketing and provides a platform to reintroduce one of my old favourites - The Iceberg Imperative.

The Iceberg Imperative states (and I should know because I invented it!) that nine-tenths of an organisation’s communications go on below the surface. The things that combine to create your customers impression of your brand, the attitudes, values and standards that are inherent in the customer experience and cause either delight or disappointment (and too often outright alienation) are, whatever you may believe, rarely controlled by the boardroom. All too often the management approach is to seek to maintain brand integrity by legislating for every point-of-delivery eventuality, but that just produces a two-foot high process manual that nobody can read, runs up a massive process training commitment and is inevitably a waste of time and effort, because a is the nature of these things, you’ll never, ever accommodate every possible scenario.

The better practice is to bring your front-line employees (in fact every employee) into the loop. Make them as intimate with your Brand Model, its values, standards, objectives and above all its inherent “promise” as you are, so that whatever situation they encounter their response will be reflective of the brand and in line with customer expectation. This way you deliver your Brand Promise and don’t have disappointed customers.

Of course this doesn’t just happen by telepathy you have to invest as much time and effort in bringing your stakeholders behind the brand as you do in the sexy media routes that you use to make your promise to end-users. And there’s the rub. Have you studied the marketing budget breakdown in your organisation lately? My bet is that you’ll find the balance between external promise-making investment and internal promise-delivering investment is way out of line.

Given that most organisations don’t get this internal marketing thing at all and massively under-invest in it anyway, its logical that a comparatively small shift in the balance of marketing investment in favour of internal marketing will bring a disproportionately high return (provided you invest wisely in a serious strategy). There’s no set proportion, its an empirical process so you’ll have to play around with it, but it has worked for my clients.

Interestingly, and I’m at a loss to understand why they haven’t spotted this years ago, it works too for marketing services organisations who are all bleating about their share of the pie being eroded, because internal marketing demands the same skills and largely the same media as an external marketing campaign, so its a great opportunity for them to strengthen relationships with their clients and increase revenue. A no-brainer really.

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand development · brands · communications · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · marketing · media · phil darby

Bridging the chasm between your boardroom and the front line

Monday 23 June 2008 · No Comments

I recently spent a few days at home in the UK and discovered UK morning TV. In particular a BBC programme called “Don’t Get Done Get Dom” where a consumer’s champion called Dominic Little (hence the “Dom”) tackles companies on behalf of customers who in one way or another feel they have been let down by them. I don’t know how typical the episodes that I caught were, but there was a very obvious common theme to the main cases.

One company that stands out was called SafeStyle Windows, a replacement window company that dramatically screwed up an installation. Another was a holiday company that had let down a couple who booked an expensive holiday. The common theme with these and others was that the customers (who were all more tenacious to start with than most I’ve come across ) all spent weeks and in some cases months trying to deal with Customer Service representatives to no avail.

Coincidentally I was having the same kind of experience with the Auto and Cycle store chain Halfords who might be the market leader in the UK by a long way, but still (or maybe because of that fact) run their show like amateur hour. My issue with them concerned a product listed on their web site that involved a product description, price and photograph that appeared to refer to three different products. I e-mailed Halfords customer service who redefined themselves as “customer abusers” by sending me an auto response that undertook to reply within SEVEN DAYS!!! In the even they exceeded that deadline by a further day by which time I’d bought the product elsewhere anyway. Well Mr Halfords, them’s the breaks!

In fact, I am sure that the folks sitting around the boardroom tables at Halfords, SafeStyle Windows and the holiday company (whose name escapes me) would be horrified if they realised how their Brand Promise was being massacred by front-line troops, but I’m equally prepared to accept that these same front-line troops are sure that they are doing what is expected of them. I realise that the picture is skewed by the directors, who I know are out there, of organisations who are happy to abuse customers as they hide behind their customer services people, but who are all sweetness and light and conciliatory once someone like Dominic Little gets past the razor-wire. However, assuming that the majority of managers are smart enough to realise that the trick to growing a business is to always delight your customers, the clear issue here is the gulf between the boardroom and the front line.

This is what internal marketing is all about, of course, but its a subject that I know most organisations fail to understand and vastly underestimate the importance of. It takes a special effort and a shift in attitude of senior managers to set up an internal marketing programme from scratch, but there’s no avoiding it if you want to stay in business these days. I often hear from directors that such an initiative would be too disruptive for their organisation and its true it can be if the concept is as alien to you as it is to some of the businesses I come across. That’s why I developed Brand Discovery, a programme of internal marketing that takes logical steps to ensure that all stakeholders are signed up and fully committed to playing their role in the delivery of the Brand Promise. What’s different about Brand Discovery is that it is an ongoing programme that becomes part of an organisation’s DNA and brings about change more by osmosis than revolution. There’s no longer a need to put the brakes on a business in order to change direction. Sure the benefits of Brand Discovery take time to filter through to your bottom line, but its not that long and I would argue that taking a more radical approach slows the momentum of a business short-term and therefore would never challenge the overall commercial benefit of Brand Discovery.

Whichever approach you take, if you are not already focussing on bridging that chasm between your boardroom and your front line with internal marketing you need to get moving. Unless, of course you want your ten minutes of fame on Don’t Get Done Get Dom!

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · National Branding · The Full Effect Company · below-the-line · brand development · brands · business development · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · promise

Specialised Specialized customer service

Thursday 5 June 2008 · No Comments

If ever I thought that I was wasting my time banging on about the the essential role of internal marketing in great customer service, I could count on a bike business to restore my faith. Yet again, a bike company (Specialized to be precise) has demonstrated how the kind of stakeholder commitment that can only be the result of great internal marketing, delivers customer service that fortunes are built on!

If you have been reading my blog for a while you’ll know that I have reported a few times on the great customer service I have received from bike businesses like RockShox (Now part of Sram), WTB and Bradburn. What is it about these businesses that make their customer service so much better than most other businesses I encounter?

OK, so I probably have more contact with bike companies than a lot of people because I ride a lot, have bikes and break components from time to time (although I am usually pretty good with my stuff), but biking isn’t my life and there are a whole lot of other businesses that supply me with products and services that relate to other things that I do, so its not that my experience is narrow.

It’s not that they are particularly small businesses either. Specialized is a major global concern so they face the same internal communications issues as any other global and they are not alone among bike businesses in this - biking is big business! So it can’t be that they are compact enough for the brand message to be easily communicated to the people on the front line. It has to be something to do with the potency of the message itself, the passion and commitment that it raises in stakeholders and/or the way it is communicated.

I guess there are few people working in bike businesses who aren’t themselves bikers, so maybe they are just more committed to the ideals of the business. Bikers are a community and within that big community there are very powerful individual brands, each representing a community of its own (those I have mentioned included). A Specialized bike is probably something rather too commonplace for a Yeti rider for example, while if you are a Specialised convert you’ll appreciate their build-quality, innovation and engineering and maybe view Trek as cheap and mass-produced - that’s “positioning” at work. (Sorry but I’m not privy to the Brand Models so I’m not sure which boxes they are each trying to tick, but then again, if they were all perfect I would know wouldn’t I!).

So, a bike manufacturer, because its stakeholders mostly comprise bikers, is working with pretty fertile ground. There’s also already a propensity for bikers to sign up to brand communities, but you still have to have a peg to hang your hat on - that big idea - and the internal marketing communications, so the fact that they are doing so well with their customer service means that these guys clearly know their stuff. (Although I do think that the press advertising that’s part of most bike companies’ external marketing generally sucks. But that’s another post).

There is room for improvement though. For example, one of the biggest challenges for any manufacturer is to get their Brand Promise represented consistently at the point of sale and Specialized, like all businesses struggle there sometimes. I have come across many instances where a manufacturer’s Brand Promise isn’t evident at the local bike shop, the UK’s most dominant wholesaler/distributor for instance, appears to be universally despised by retailers, which can’t be good for anyone’s business, but Specialised do better than most with their customer service even at the sharp end of their sales chain and this has to be down to sound internal marketing. So, if anybody at Specialised is listening, I’d be interested to hear what you do and even more interested to help you reign in those local bike shop owners and staff a bit tighter.

Oh, and thanks to Duncan Cruxton at Specialized for sorting my cycle computer problem!

Categories: Brand Discovery · Brand Model · Brand promise · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · The Full Effect Company · brand development · brands · communications · community · customer · customer service · customers · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · promise · retailer

Maintaining eyeball-to-eyeball retailing

Monday 2 June 2008 · No Comments

The trouble with business success is that its like a computer game - you overcome one set of problems, arrive at a new level and then find that there’s a whole new set of problems to overcome. What’s more, because they are always new challenges, you encounter them with no experience upon which to base your response, so you are perpetually learning on the job. And its a treadmill that once you are on, you can’t get off - every level of success brings new challenges and every solution moves you to the next level.

Organisations in every sector will know what I am talking about and one of the major challenges that becomes bigger with every advance you make is that of just managing the day-to-day of your business. Those of you who know me or who take the time to read my stuff or turn up for my seminars and workshops will know that I’m no fan of routines or bureaucracy, but I’ll be the first to admit that you have to have a way of tackling the ever-growing challenge of the day-to-day. You’ll also know that one of my big things is the impact that apparently insignificant actions, that happen well away from the boardroom, will always have on your overall success.  This also highlights the demand for a way of passing information up and down the chain of command.

It’s a dilemma with a couple of possible solutions. The one favoured in the past and which is still, sadly, adopted by the head-in-the-sand school of management is dictatorship - basically you give nobody the space or the authority to do anything other than what you instruct them to do. The problem with this, as many organisations and a number of countries have spectacularly demonstrated, is that it involves a level of micro-management (and/or a degree of coercion) that no organisation can sustain and even if you succeed in controlling things you are going to miss out on a bunch of valuable and increasingly rare opportunities. The other route is delegation … Agaaaaaaaaaaaah! I can hear the muffled cries from below sand level in boardrooms around the world right now, but if you are one of those to whom this sounds like heracy, there’s no escaping it - its time you went cold turkey on those old habits, put down the stick and find yourself a carrot - yes, as the man said, your future is orange!

I spend a great deal of time in the retail world. One of the things that I have always loved about the sector is that its one of the last bastions of the entrepreneur, where you can actually get stuff done and try new ideas while they are still new. New stuff often represents less of a risk for a retailer than it does to other types of organisation because retailers have eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the customer and therefore understand them better and therefore have maximum scope for making a sale. That’s why when an fmcg company wants to understand customers one of the places they go for insight is the retailers who channel their products.

Retailers are big businesses these days. They have access to an unbelievable volume of data and partners who can analyse it inside-out and tell them the innermost secrets of consumer minds. However, its a two-edged sword. Because they are so big a retailer’s chain of command has lengthened. No longer can it be taken for granted that the folks on their front line have that retail blood, possess the corporate gene or really understand the objectives that you set for them - unless you tell them that is.

Did you ever play Chinese Whispers as a kid? You know, that game where you all stand in a line and the person at one end whispers a message into the ear of the second and the message is passed down the line from there, usually to arrive much changed at the other end? The famous example being “Send three and fourpence …” quoted from the first world war (so Google it!). The same applies to the instructions and customer feedback that is transmitted back and forth between the shop floor and the retail boardroom. Most organisations, retailers included, now acknowledge the need to give their sales people, at least, some discretion at the point of sale. The trouble is that in order to make the right choices the shop assistant needs a load of information and motivation and that’s where most organisations fail.

What I am talking about here is internal marketing. When I started my career in what was called the “Advertising, Marketing and Display Department” of a national retailer I tackled this by introducing a regular (weekly or monthly, I can’t remember) bulletin containing instructions and insights, which we mailed (can’t even imagine doing so now) to every manager of every one of our 100+ stores (that was a big retail chain then!). My contemporary take on this solution is a far more complex integration of things like Internet, direct mail, mobile training workshops and special events, based on my essential tool for all businesses the Full Effect Marketing Brand Model.

Internal marketing for today’s unwieldy companies, if tackled in this way, provides the essential two-way flow of information that’s the stuff of success and absolutely essential to retail and a few other sectors where entrepreneurship still lives. The Full Effect Marketing Brand Model establishes ten critical aspects of the brand, including the Brand Promise that will be an important basis of every decision in every corner of every business and the integrated communications routes that are Full Effect Marketing itself ensure consistency in message (in just the same way that your external communications should). If everybody in your business “gets it”, as they will if this is done properly, the decisions that they make in their every-day functions will be the right ones an you’ll get accurate reliable feedback from the shop floor that in turn will make the decisions you make than much easier.

It may well be that, given the number of employees involved, internal marketing is more complex for retailers than for other types of business, but we have the technology and its really just a matter of understanding how to use it. A typical retail integrated internal marketing campaign might incorporate in-store radio or TV, a LAN or WAN university and direct mail. I recently created a travelling circus for a retailer that took training to the shop floor in a way they had never seen it before and I created a plan for another retailer that involved a radical internal promotion/event that was never launched (due to unforeseen circumstances unconnected to the event) but which was exciting, colourful, competitive, contemporary and above all very educational.

I see signs all the time of retailers who are losing their grip. The ideas that are agreed on in the boardroom are not always being represented on the shop floor. Sure this happens in other sectors too, but for a retailer, building that up-close-and-personal relationship with customers is what its all about. So, get a grip. sort out your internal marketing and let’s not lose it!

Categories: Brand Model · CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · Retail · The Full Effect Company · advertising · below-the-line · brand · communications · community · consulting · corporate · customer · customer service · customers · decision · decision-making · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · retailer · sales

Delivering the customer service promise … or not!

Wednesday 27 February 2008 · No Comments

logo.jpg

I’m on a customer service kick again having just wasted the best part of a day battling with O2’s customer support.

In the Czech Republic Telefonica O2 recently acquired the once state-owned Czech Telecom and their mobile counterpart Eurotel and with them what was probably the worst customer service in the developed world.  Somehow the arrogance of public ownership had combined with a Communist appreciation of what customer service is all about, absolutely no consumer insights and zero training to create a customer service resource that had infinite flexibility to be able NOT to deliver whatever you needed.  Yes, I am sure they actually went out of their way to make life impossible!

Luckily the boys at Telefonica have risen to the challenge and in a reasonably short period have begun to respond to  current needs, anticipate future ones and even create processes for resolving them.

My problem was that as a self-confessed media junkie (integration was invented just for me) I travel the world with my lap-top set up to deliver English language TV, movies, news etc. wherever I may be.  I’m not usually at my Prague base for long periods of time but this month I appear to have outstayed my welcome (at least with Telefonica/O2) by downloading more than they think I should have (Maybe something to do with watching the entire first series of Lost!?).  The result being that I received a hefty slap on the wrist in the form of a download speed restriction that reduced my bandwidth from 4mb to 88kbps - very friendly!

Now, I could launch into one of my pet subjects here with a piece entitled “When is unlimited download not unlimited?” and turn this whole thing around into a case for revealing the “fair user policy” that some ISPs adopt for the miss-sell that it represents - to my mind if you buy unlimited download you should get unlimited download and anything short of that should be considered breach of contract.  However, I’m determined to keep to the point here, which is … why having gone to all the trouble of training and devising programmes for the resolution of customer issues anybody - and Telefonica are not alone here - should hand it over to web site developers to completely bugger up.

Why, when everyone seems to be talking about and nodding to the suggestion that you should never be more than a couple of clicks away from satisfaction on any web site, do so many organisations that I believe genuinely understand customers and want to solve their problems, have web sites with customer support that you need GPS and a native guide to find your way around? (My old English teacher would love that sentence/paragraph!)

All I wanted to do was buy a quid’s worth of extra bandwidth to see me through the week and it took four phone calls and more time on the O2 web site that I would care to recall (or add-up the cost of).  The reasons for this were firstly that this service is not available via the telephone customer service, only on line.  Secondly, web site navigation was unending, but my biggest issue is that, for some reason that I can’t fathom, Telefonica O2 insist on giving things cute names that you are supposed to instinctively relate.

Pardon me for being simple, but if I want to buy extra bandwidth I’m looking for a menu item that says something like “buy extra bandwidth”.  Unfortunately T/O2 don’t see it that way.  They think that its far more appropriate to list “Data Klik” among a never ending menu of similarly cute names at the end of a navigation challenge that goes like this.

Home>Private>Customer Care>On-line Services and applications>Log-in (this is great because you are supposed to have at your fingertips a sixteen character login and password that you won’t have used since the day you set up your modem)>My services>Data Klik (if you knew it was call this)>order>send.  Sorted!

Maybe I’m slow, but it took me conversations with four different customer service representatives to fathom that route.  Yes, I couldn’t buy the service on the phone but I had to use the phone service to find out how to use the on-line service - does that make sense? - No, of course not!  Only the last guy gave me the impression that he had ever seen the web site himself or knew that what I was looking for was “data klik”.  One thought I could buy it from a colleague over the phone, but having transferred me the colleague was as confused as I was, another cut me off and didn’t call back (I assume they have number recognition at the telephone company?) the third gave me completely the wrong instructions - Oh, and I got through to a recorded message that told me that there were no operators available, but if I left a message they would call me back, which I did.  That was two days ago now and I’m still waiting!

So, I guess at least some of the morals of this story are:

  • Never trust a web developer to create a customer service web site
  • Keep marketing speak out of it - call a spade a spade and everyone will understand.
  • If your mechanism doesn’t deliver your customer service, you have no customer service.

Actually, this experience actually had a negative influence on my opinion of Telefonica/O2 and it is a really good example of where the inefficiencies lie in organisations like this.  They could significant and directly reduce their need for investment by fixing this problem, but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to the savings they would make if they just stopped pissing customers off by putting them through this mill. 

As the market leader by a long way they may be less driven than their competitors on issues like this and rather less concerned than they should be about achieving efficiencies and increasing ROI, but as one of their competitors has pledged to take their leadership position within two years I hardly think they can afford to hang around. 

Of course this is my old subject Integrated Marketing again and how it applies to the delivery of the brand promise - in this case the promise is “customer service”!

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · O2 · Telefonica · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · call centre · central europe · contact centre · customer service · design · efficiency · management · marketing · navigation · on-line · phil darby · purchasing · web site

Is your customer service a sham?

Tuesday 29 January 2008 · 1 Comment

Hear no evilI’m  having a bad IT day!  Its bad because, since I installed Adobe Reader 7.1.1, every time I open a PDF file my computer hangs, It might be a coincidence of course, but its particularly bad because the people who I think are responsible and who are certainly the only people who know for sure are in denial.

I have spent more hours that I can’t afford trying to get hold of customer support at Adobe.  They have the tab on their web site, but it leads to a treadmill of links that just keep you going round in a circle and getting absolutely nowhere. 

It can’t be that they have gotten their navigation a bit wrong by mistake - they are programming experts for Christ’s sake! - This happens for one simple reason.  They clearly don’t want to know. 

I suppose if they admitted that Reader had a flaw they’d be in trouble and I guess they don’t know how to fix it so the best thing (they think) is to pretend I am imagining it.  Their strategy is to get me into this loop and keep me there until I give up and go away. 

Adobe are not alone in adopting this strategy of course, there are many businesses out there doing the same thing, but is sucks.  Thirty minutes ago I felt it sucks because I needed them a) to admit that their programme has a glitch - there are enough people writing posts on the Internet about the same thing to reassure me that I am not alone in this assumption (Google “Adobe Acrobat hangs computers” and you get 53,500 entries) - and b) to fix it!

Now though I’m over it.  Why? Because Adobe are no longer a feature of my life.  I’ve taken out every Adobe file that I can find in my computer and I’m in the process of replacing them with perfectly good alternatives.  Here’s the one for Reader and its FREE! and my computer is working fine!

I was writing elsewhere yesterday that its possibe to turn problems like this into positives - like Hoover did with their Air Miles screw up - and you don’t even always need to call in the PR disaster recovery squad.  However, you first have to recognise that you have a problem!  If you don’t, of course, it will, eventually …   bite you on the arse!

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · acrobat · adobe · brands · contact centre · customer service · management · marketing · pdf · phil darby · reader

What brand development is really all about - Part II. Community

Wednesday 9 January 2008 · 2 Comments

community

A brand, like the district you choose to live in or the club that you join, is a community.  You feel comfortable there, it fits you like an old arm chair, it reflects your personality and values and when you give people your address or mention your club they make assumptions about you based on its location (”country bumpkin” or “city trendy”) or maybe the social level that it represents (”middle/upper/working class”) and more. 

I once advised a mobile phone company that had a reputation for being a bit cheap and basic.  Domestic subscribers loved them, their problem was that they couldn’t attract business users.  They could satisfy their practical demands, but their reputation for being cheap kept getting in the way.  In those days you couldn’t switch networks and take your number with you so the objection raised by business users was “if people can see from my number that I am on this network they will think I’m cheap and basic too”.  And, they were right!  Its about the community to which you belong.

Think of the way we sometimes describe people “… so and so is OK but he hangs out with a bad crowd …” - same for brands.  Another client of mine told me recently that because his business was ”number one” in their sector they made a point of only appointing suppliers and partners who were “number one” in theirs.  He felt that it underlined his own positioning.  So if your brand is sold alongside products or brands, or in outlets that don’t reflect your standards and values, you might find that your reputation is being tarnished.  Then again, if you need a bit of brand social climbing it can help just to hang out with the blue-chip boys.

Buy a product, join the community and you instantly have a badge to wear.  This is the old Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs coming into play - I am what I buy, own, eat etc …  A brand transforms customers’ lives by giving them both a sense of belonging and, ironically, at the same time a feeling of individual expression.  Remember, “American Express says more about you than cash ever can” or “I was just an accountant until I discovered Smirnoff”?

An interesting thing about a community is that its a two-way street.  While it influences its members they in turn also influence the community.  Its just like a new family moving into a residential neighbourhood.  They choose to be there because it reflects their vision of themselves, but their arrival changes the dynamic of the place - for better or worse depending on your viewpoint.  It works the same with brand communities.  

Marketers often complain that consumers are promiscuous and its true - sometimes they are (although there are two sides to every divorce case and often customers are enticed away from brand monogamy by the promise of a badge they are just happier to be seen with).  However, brand promiscuity is often misunderstood.  People are complex and individual, its rare that one brand will satisfy all the requirements for badges of recognition of any one customer.  That’s why, as consumers we adopt a portfolio of brands (sometimes more than one for a particular product sector), which between them cover all the things we want to represent.  I know a guy who wears Nike shoes to play his sport in because they are serious “tools” but chooses Puma when he’s hanging out because he feels they are cool.  With the choices we have available to us the permutations are almost limitless.  Certainly sufficient to represent a wide range of individual personalities.

This all means that as a brand guardian (Hey, I know you know, brands are not “owned” by the organisations that use them) you have to be sensitive to the needs and wants of your community and go with the flow.  It’s why interactive communications are important - things like blogs, chat rooms, “how are we doing?” cards, problem pages.  I just spent a frustrating few minutes trying to find contact information on the web site of a well known retailer.  I could find the address of my nearest store and I could “give feedback” that I know would end up being handled by some operator at a contact centre in India in a few days time.  This isn’t interactivity, this is an attempt to pass indifference off as genuine interest.  What I want is to “connect” with someone at the company who can do something … and I can’t even find a phone number for their switchboard! 

Like any other consumer, I want to know what people - other community members, just like me - are saying about my communities, the products, values, services it represents or even just stuff in general - like a couple of old wives gossiping over the garden fence.  I want a help line, live chat or at least an e-mail problem page, because that’s community and when I get to the point where I am tearing what’s left of my hair out, I want to know that there’s someone who cares enough to have left their number for me to call.  This retailer clearly just doesn’t get it.

The trouble with all of this is that its a mountain of work and we have to apply technology to get through it.  The pit that many organisations fall into with this is that the technology intrudes on the relationship, making it cold and impersonal, in effect neutralising the benefits that the interactivity is meant to create.  Smart people apply their technology sensitively - its not difficult, it just takes some thought.  In the next few years we’ll see massive development in this area.  Technologies that facilitate without intruding.  Recent developments in AVATARs support this prediction.  KMP in the UK are playing with some great programming that adds expression to AVATARS that really helps you look them in the eye, but my guess is that we’ll see integration of a far wider range of technologies and communications routes in the quest to make brand communities more supportive and involving.  My friend was relating to me recently that he was in the middle of buying theatre tickets when he was called away from his computer.  After a few minutes he received an SMS message on his phone saying something like “Don’t forget, you are in the middle of booking your theatre tickets”.  How’s that for community building?  However, if you think that’s cool, wait and see what turns up next.  Better still, don’t wait, build your brand community by applying technology creatively to situations like this.  All it takes is a little community spirit.

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · consulting · corporate · customer service · management · marketing · phil darby · strategy

“Integrated Marketing”. If you don’t know what it is, you probably aren’t doing it!

Tuesday 1 January 2008 · 4 Comments

I’ve been trawling the blogs this week and I’m amazed at just how confused some of the “experts” are about integrated marketing.  For example, it seems to be a  common misconception that “integrated marketing” is buying all your marcoms from one source. 

Apart from the fact that this is impossible anyway (the range of elements is infinitely wider than any one marketing firm could accommodate) its just utter bollocks!  Buying all your services from one place, if it were not complete fiction, might be a termed a one-stop shop, which is the band-waggon that a bunch of terminally unimaginative marketing services firms jumped on back in the seventies when they realised that their gravy train was heading into a siding, but forget it, you are not even close.  So let’s start at the beginning.

“Marketing” is the process of leveraging an organisation’s resources to deliver the solution to a customer need - right?  Its not advertising or any other kind of communication and its certainly not “sales” (Don’t all those recruitment ads for marketing managers that are really sales jobs just do your head in?) although both of these are components of marketing.

Conversely, “communication”, is not “marketing” but something that we all use, all the time, including when we are “doing” marketing, in which context it involves stuff like advertising, PR (That’s Press and Public Relations), direct marketing, web for sure (I wish I hadn’t started this list because all those that I don’t list you’ll think I’ve forgotten!  Please take it that we all know the traditional media routes).  It also means that often forgotten and massively misunderstood area - internal marketing.  However, it embraces stuff like the way your phones are answered, the way your company vehicles are driven, the look and feel of your stores, the attitude of your sales staff, your products themselves, where the are sold … I could go on, but the last time a workshop of mine made a list we had to stop at a hundred and counting.  Take it from me no organisation appreciates all the ways in which it communicates.

“Sales” come into it for the first time somewhere in the middle of the marketing process - the stages before are the lead up to the sale and the bits afterwards are CRM leading on to repeat purchases (which is where the investment really starts to pay off).

“Integrated”, last time I looked at a dictionary, meant “combining”.  I don’t think that’s changed.  So “integrated marketing” is (drum roll) “combining your marketing”!  Simple isn’t it?  Well, no actually, it isn’t.

“Integrated marketing” means taking all your marketing elements and making sure that they are all working efficiently and effectively together to achieve a common goal. 

So, if marketing involves every area of a business, to be integrated you have to embrace every aspect of your business with a single strategy that addresses every function - an integrated business and marketing strategy - and ultimately one management point.  However, the big obstacle to actually “doing” integrated marketing is the way that most businesses are set up.  The traditional business model encourages silos and ivory tower thinking, positions marketing as a separate, support function and therefore actually prevents  integration!

To achieve the kind of efficiency that is essential for a business today the organisation has to be built around its brand, marketing has to be the core discipline and firmly in the driving seat and the marketing department coordinates.  There is no other way, this is how it works and the organisations that have quit arguing and just got on with it are now reaping the rewards.  Great for them because they have established a new level of competition.  Using a soccer analogy its as though they are playing 4-4-2 when the rest are still using the 2-3-5 formation that went out with the introduction of the off-side law in the 1920’s.

The thought of changing their structure and introducing new thinking is viewed by many organisations as a step too far, which is why we see many businesses clinging on to the old ways.  However, they’ll either change or die and the sooner they start with a new approach the less painful and the more manageable the change process will be.  In fact, it needn’t be as traumatic as some people expect, as long as its done early enough and there’s just about time to get in on the act, although we are well into the eleventh hour already.

Its clear why a marketing services firm like an advertising agency isn’t going to be able to help you out - its a long way beyond their area of expertise, although it doesn’t stop some of them offering.  Its also nothing that  design group or branding agency can solve for you either, although we need these firms, who at least understand a little of the subject, to contribute their communications expertise to integrated marketing strategies.  There’s no getting away from it, its up to the organisation to take the initiative and prepare the ground.  Such an organisation should also be ready to handle the ongoing coordination and management, although probably with the support of a marketing or business specialist, but beware, there are a great many so-called experts out there who don’t really get it.

Categories: CRM · Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · advertising · brand · brands · consulting · customer service · efficiency · internal marketing · management · marketing · phil darby · sales · strategy

Delivering the promise is about management will not employee ability.

Tuesday 11 December 2007 · No Comments

Don‘t you just love Kevin Robert’s review of his American Airlines experience?  It takes me back to a similar, though far less protracted, experience I had on a flight from London to LA when I was diverted to Sacramento because of a storm. 

Because the airport was closed for the night (!) I spent four hours sitting on the tarmac with two-hundred flatulent Americans in an aluminium tube with no refreshments and no working toilets while they searched for a truck with an integral generator that they “knew they had somewhere”, which they needed to start the plane up again.  It turns out someone from maintenance had used it to take himself home at the end of his shift!

However, what this is really about is the commitment of employees to their role in delivering the promise … or not, as the case may be.  Failure to deliver is the single most damaging omission an organisation can make and getting it right is a simple matter of communication.  Communicating a promise that is realistic and then communicating to the people who are going to make it happen so they know what they have to do.  So what is AA’s promise?  Well, as far as I can see they don’t really have one.  Their strap line is “Why you fly” which is bollocks - I fly because I have to to get from A to B and frankly, the pain that air travel represents these days makes me increasingly doubtful of its worth.  AA’s web site says:

“American Airlines and American Eagle are in business to provide safe, dependable, and friendly air transportation to our customers, along with numerous related services. We are dedicated to making every flight you take with us something special …

Well they certainly scored on that one!  It goes on …

… Your safety, comfort, and convenience are our most important concerns. In June of this year American Airlines and other members of the Air Transport Association agreed to prepare and submit to the Department of Transportation (DOT) service plans addressing particular issues of consumer interest. American Airlines and American Eagle submitted their joint Customer Service Plan to the DOT on September 15, 1999″.

1999? - they are on to it then!  There’s more …

“We are constantly reevaluating our customer service goals, and we intend to update this Customer Service Plan when appropriate”.

Obviously they haven’t seen any reason to “update” their customer service goals in the past eight years.

“Our goal is to be a service and product leader in the airline industry”.

As I said, its about the delivery not the promise.

I can visualise the executives at AA sitting around their boardroom crying over Kevin’s letter of complaint - not!   But if they were they’d probably be bemoaning the fact that their employees don’t support them in their efforts to deliver - well in my experience that’s usually the way it goes.  What these people don’t get is that if employees aren’t delivering, its management commitment that is in question not employees. Failure to communicate, failure to motivate, failure to develop a culture of community, that’s about management deficit.

As a consultant I see plenty of organisations like this, most of which see employing me as an opportunity to relinquish responsibility for the “management” of their business.  Its amazing that the country responsible for AA is also the home of Southwest Airlines who wrote the book on internal marketing (which is what we are talking about) its called “Nuts”, well actually Kevin Freiberg wrote it about them. And they are still doing it.  On 15th November they announced their 125th consecutive quarterly share dividend!  Now if that doesn’t persuade you that internal marketing pays I guess nothing will!

Categories: Full Effect · Full Efffect Marketing · The Full Effect Company · brand · brands · consulting · corporate · customer service · efficiency · internal marketing · marketing · phil darby · strategy