Archive for category Improvement
Changing the conversation, not the channel
Posted by admin in Business, Communication, Improvement on January 4, 2012
In my 10 or so years in marketing and communications the one principle that I have lived by above all is “if you do not like what people are saying, change the conversation”.
Naturally our instinct is to change the channel. We ignore complaints, run from them, or remove the people complaining. It is my natural tendency and I am willing to bet it is yours as well.
Sometimes, in fact I would dare say most of the time, the problem isn’t the channel but the conversation. Sometimes it is an outspoken person who finally says what everyone is thinking, sometimes it is a conversation you keep changing channels on instinctively. Usually however there are nuggets of truth in that conversation that are hard to accept.
Couple of case studies. First, United Airlines. In 2008 a local musician watched baggage handlers throwing his guitar around as they were loading it on the plane. After he recovered his luggage he found his guitar broken. This became the United Breaks Guitars incident. The musician went through the channels alerting employees and eventually corporate. They all ignored him, saying he missed a timeline for reporting or that it was an accident.
The musician, Dave Carroll, then decided to use his musical talents and create a youtube video parodying his guitar breakage. The song became an instant youtube hit. United instead of trying to change the conversation changed the channel. The result cost United roughly $180 million in stock value.
The second case study is not an incident but a long trending organizational problem. Domino’s pizza had a problem, it made a crappy pizza. When you are a pizza company making a bad pizza is probably not good for business. Dominos was ranked so bad that it was tied for last place among popular pizza chains with Chuck E. Cheese.
Domino’s customers complained and they ignored them. Employees complained and they fired them. Most importantly in this is not the number of complaints or firings but how many customers went somewhere else or quality employees quit for another job.
Unlike United, Domino’s after changing the channel for several years decided to change the conversation. New CEO Patrick Doyle decided to hear the conversation and find out why it was being said. He then took that very conversation and used it in their favor, changing products based on what customers complain about. The result is that the conversation changed. Domino’s is no longer known for cardboard crust but for customer service. The result is that in the past 2 years Domino’s has seen its stock grown 230+%.
There are hundreds of other case studies that show both sides of the conversation. Companies, organizations, and governments who have changed the channel and lost in the long run or changed the conversation and experienced gains. There are very few absolutes in marketing and PR, but when faced with a crisis of any sort I’ve yet to see this fail.
Understanding modern buyer flow
Posted by admin in Business, Improvement, Marketing on October 27, 2011
Every morning when I wake up I immediately turn over and look at my phone for any emails that came in over the night. Without fail I typically have 5-6 emails from various brands and companies who send me an “eblast” that is time stamped at 12:00 a.m.. So naturally I jump out of bed, throw on some shoes, and run to the mall to take advantage of the sale right? Wrong. The basic problem here is something that has become rampant across digital marketing and ecommerce. Companies have began to completely ignore buyer flow.
In the old days when consumer’s main interaction with purchase decision making came inside the actual store marketers got it. Companies spend (and still do) millions of dollars studying buyer flow in a super market or retail store. Marketers analyzed where on shelves the average consumer looked first, some areas have more prestige than others for example and make a customer feel like the product is of higher quality. They analyzed what flow customers purchased, so the cereal for example is typically placed at the front right of a store and milk in the back left because we knew that customers would purchase milk after cereal, not the other way around, and that is the movement of a typical consumer (front to back, right to left).
In retail and clothing shopping this was also true. Say you run a clothing store in a mall. You place items that typically garner attention toward the front where it is visible from the outside to draw people into the store. Once there you place low selling items between two groups of high selling in order to stimulate sales from people moving between the two product groups.
Mass marketing understood this buyer flow as well. Most high value shopping was done on the weekends. As a result markets would load the Sunday paper up with retail ads, most of them highlighting high value products in an effort to draw consumers into the store. During the week when budget shopping took place (groceries for example) marketers would send out coupons and sales with the desire to attract their spending.
Now, back to my eblast example. Something is lost here. Instead of trying to influence buying decision making moments marketers are just throwing out information to check it off their list. They ignore the flow of the modern consumer. The best time to reach a consumer is when they are about to enter a decision making scenario. Additionally, now you have to understand what device they will be receiving information at when they are into that buying flow and format it for that usage.
For example, recently I met with a large clothing retailer. Most of their purchasing still comes through a physical store rather than online. Most of their online sales are repeat items such as shirts with the same shirt size, underwear, socks, and other items like that. Why is this? Because people want to know that the item fits before they order it online to not deal with the hassle of returns. The decision making happens inside the store for the majority of consumers.
By trying to influence the decision through a midnight email (which thankfully they do not do) they would miss that influential moment. Why? Because the stores do not open until 10, by the time the person read the email in the morning until the time the store opened the influence has passed. Secondly if they did make a decision to purchase online we know that retail type online purchasing is typically done in early afternoon or, increasingly, during the prime time hours (7-10 p.m.).
In this example in order to play on buyer flow the retailer should look for ways to transfer in store buying to online buying through smart phones, because that is the device they have on them when in a store. Also we know that tablet browsing tends to spike as well during the prime time areas, so build a tablet friendly site and work on ways to drive people to that site during that time frame.
Anything marketing outside of the buyer flow decreases ROI and brand identity. The good part for marketers is that data in digital is highly reliable and very easily available. Study your analytics. Set up custom reporting to understand when people are making purchases and how they arrive at that decision. Analyze your email campaigns, don’t just look for open rates, look at click rates and then bring those into the flow of your site analytics to find out when and if those campaigns translate to purchases. Don’t be afraid to play with timing through A/B split campaigns to see what works best for an audience.
Above all learn about your customer. If a customer feels like you understand them then they are more likely to buy from you. Working into a buyer flow is as much about relationship marketing as it is about influencing buying. When I receive an email at midnight I know that the company does not understand me. When I receive one near a decision making point my relationship with the brand becomes positive.
The local paper problem
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement on January 25, 2011
Someone told me once that it might be a bad idea as a communications professional to talk bad about the primary newspaper in the state. I apparently didn’t listen. It is not fair of me however to put them down constantly without a full explanation of why.
This has nothing to do with pay walls online as a lot of people want to highlight. It is all about the content, which in case you have not read a paper in a while, makes up about 90% of what is in a paper. I will explain why this is the problem, but first, a history lesson.
See not too long ago newspapers were the primary way we received information about both local issues and national. Papers would take all the information from the previous day, mostly in the form of newswires like the Associated Press, mix in a few local stories and send it to you. That worked great.
This model began to get a little shaky in the 90’s with the rise and adoption of 24 hour news stations on television. The primary problem with tv news however was that while great for breaking news, you had to wait to hear about topical news that interest you. Papers survived on allowing you to directly get the information you want. Once a day at least.
Internet presented the next big hit to newspapers. This transition was slow at first. The combination of slow support from the news media and limited adoption of broadband internet gave newspapers some time to adjust and get in front of the curve. Most big papers with a little extra resource did. They began leading the way in pushing out news. As broadband adoption rose in the late 2000’s so did the consumption of news online. It became easier to go online and have instant access to what is happening around the world. This was the pull phase, readers went and pulled information from the sources.
Then the 800 lbs. gorilla walked into the room. News sources started pushing information both actively and passively. I get breaking news on email, my phone and socially. Even more critical is that news sources have made it simple to share stories so now I am 75% more likely to read a story that a friend shares.
I said this was not about pay walls, and it is not. These news sources however are freely available and easily accessed. Most of the national news feeds can be found in some form or another online, which brings me back to content. Some local papers panicked when online adoption started to rise. They made a critical business decision to save resources by tapping into more feed stories and hiring fewer reporters for original content. The problem with local papers is not the reporters. I know plenty; most of them are overworked and are given less and less space to show their quality talent.
As local papers began to push out more articles from feeds they began to dig their own grave. I as a consumer am already receiving my national news both by push and pull methods. Most Americans are in the same boat. I start finding less and less information that I want to read in a news paper because it is a feed dump from the day before, most of which I have already read. The stories I care most about, which are the local ones I do not receive from my national news, have be shrunk into paragraphs or ran once a week because of fewer reporters.
See, local newspapers cannot compete with regurgitation of national news. They must look at focusing on local stories and impacts. The day of a catch all local paper is dead and the start of specialization has begun. Papers can no longer focus a once a daily or weekly paper on news items, rather they must move more toward editorials and impact stories.
A clear example of how this works is Arkansas Business. Full disclosure: I have a lot of respect for them; many of their employees have become friends. I advertise and pitch them stories because they do it right. They save (for the most part) breaking news updates for the web. Even then they try to add commentary about how it impacts us locally. They focus the print edition on telling stories about businesses locally and the impacts they are making in the community. This move to a story telling approach is what made them successful in a changing news climate.
Local/state papers in order to survive must shift to this story telling approach. Yes ADG has publications that do this like Sync, but they fail to embrace the concept with their core (and rapidly dwindling) audience. Give people stories they care about and they will start to care about you again. That is how to fix the local paper and people will even pay for it.
As always everything I say is up for debate. I appreciate feedback, just be willing to defend it.
Social media hates you
Posted by admin in Improvement, Social Media on January 4, 2011
I like to pick up a few social media consulting gigs from time to time. I do this less for the money and more for the challenge of looking at another business situation and analyzing how they can create better relationships. Recently I had a meeting with a wonderful company that is on the verge of rolling out a great new product for their customers who they value. In this meeting I was hit with the simplest yet most complex question.
Why should I care?
Here is the reality. If you are a traditional marketer you shouldn’t care. Social media hates you. You push out messages and want no response other than a sale. You think of your customers in terms of sales numbers. You want to be able to tie a marketing event with a consumer action. You want customer service to handle product complaints. You want to disguise the reality of your product in lingo and lies. You should honestly stay as far away from social media as possible because you can’t handle what it means.
I’ve been careful in my consulting to avoid these types of companies. I’ve turned down a number who want to use social media to push a product. To be successful a company practice love, not sales.
Love, in social media, happens when a company who cares more about customers than products. That is a company that cares more about building positive relationships than selling you what is hot today. The funny thing is that building this positive relationship creates far more product sales than simply selling a product ever could. You should care about social media only because you care for your customers and desire a positive relationship with them. Customers want to be loved, not sold.
What we create when we communicate
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement, Marketing on October 26, 2010
Sorry for the long delay. This is the second in the communicating better series. Last time I looked at ethics in communications. As always feel free to drop comments here, on twitter or verbally and I can assure you it will impact future discussions.
The old days
Remember walkie-talkies? We thought they were the coolest thing as kids. This was before cell phones hit critical mass and every kid older than 7 had one. Later in life as a camp counselor (poor kids) we used them to communicate around the camp. With walkie-talkies you pressed the button, said what you had to say and waited for a response. This was a transition based communication.
This is how we use to view communication. I sent a message, you received it and then you sent back your response. The focus in this model quickly becomes on how I craft the message I push out. My hope was that you would interpret the message with the same meaning that I intended and vice versa. Sadly this is how most of us still function with our business messages. We send a press release, ad, put up a website or say something on social media, and then we sit back and hope it is interpreted the way we intended. Ineffective, hopeless
Tag, you are It
The major problem with this type of communication is that we start viewing customers as “It”. We push out an email campaign and monitor the open and click through rates and use that as a measure of success. We monitor ad impression rates and try to find correlation between impression and sales. We count our twitter followers, our newsletter subscribers and the circulation numbers on our press releases.
Repeat after me: Customers are not a metric
We have to move beyond viewing customers as it. @Bryanjones wrote a great post looking at social engagement in which he references Martin Buber (who I am a fan of). Buber talks about the need to move from an I-it relationship to an I-thou. Essentially by doing this you are viewing people not as metrics, but as people. Isn’t that what they should always have been?
We create something
Allow me to introduce you to another great person, his name is Barnett Pearce (read his blog sometime, great wisdom). Pearce along with pal Vernon Cronen developed a concept known as Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). CMM says that when we communicate we create something. Instead of me sending you a message and you sending me one back we exchange messages together. From those messages we develop a shared meaning based on our unique relationship. This relationship is different from any other that I have, and through understanding what we have created I am able to communicate with you to the absolute best of my ability.
This moves beyond the walkie-talkie communication model and we try to interact with our customers and build relationships. I’ve said for years this is the real interactive marketing, not building a web page or advertising online. Is it really that hard to form a relationship with each of your customers? Unless you are Wal-mart or some large retailer I would think not.
So maybe communicating better is becoming more aware of the people we communicate with. We become aware of what we are creating with them. We become aware of what they need. Ultimately they might just become aware of us. And that is a good thing
The Mesh Model
Posted by admin in Business, Improvement, Vision on October 7, 2010
So if you have been following this week I’ve discussed the new problem in business plaguing creative employees. As a result of this new problem creative employees are creating a new business paradigm by forgoing traditional employment and focusing more on independent work. This obviously has a big impact on business today and I would like to finish this series exploring that impact.
History Repeats
First off this is not the first time this sort of creative exodus has happened. As @pstrack pointed out yesterday in the comments his current business was a result of a similar movement. Us creative people tend to periodically throw a fit together and create movements. This has happened several times throughout history and this is nothing completely unique. History in business as well as everything else has a tendency to repeat itself. Such is the case here.
What was old is new
While this is a bit of a reoccurring theme and can quickly be dismissed as the same old movement, there is something different about this one. People are extremely connected, more so than ever before. In this new flat world it is essential to include this factor because it is very significant. Before when people left a business to go alone they would work hard, hire people under them, and eventually create a new small business of their own.
The mesh model
Connectivity changes everything. Now instead of having to go and hire employees, which is the biggest business risk of all, people can form connections with other people who possess the talents they need. I am going to step out on a limb here and suggest we could see a whole new business model arise from this new paradigm.
I call it the mesh business model. You suddenly have an abundance of highly connected independent workers who can form very loose alliances with each other. The business structure becomes very horizontal with each person operating independently while at the same time supporting each other. In this structure it is in everyone’s best interest to do the best job possible because they themselves are essentially the owner responsible for their independent company.
The vertical
The basic problem is vertical companies are dying and fast. In a vertical company the Peter Principle takes place often. You see people rise in a company until they are no longer competent for their position and that is where they stay. This is an old business model that cannot continue to survive in an increasingly creative business world.
In the vertical workers are motivated by respect and pay. Often respect is either not given because of a boss’s inability to understand the necessity of respect, or because the boss does not understand the contribution of the worker.
This leaves pay as the typical motivator. Pay is a business risk, companies hold out on paying more until it is more risky not to pay. In a good economy you worry about an employee leaving so to retain them you pay the more. As I showed in the first blog of this series companies have the upper hand and therefore do not have to continue to pay to retain. In fact the average company has decreased their pay to creative workers over the past 2 years.
The new business
So what does this mean for businesses moving forward? Actually I believe this will be a positive step for businesses that can embrace the change. Companies can lower their overall operational cost by contracting with creative individuals rather than having them on staff. They also are able to get higher quality work by utilizing people with specific talents required by the job.
For creative individuals this means having the ability to take control of your own success. You become paid and reworded based on the quality and frequency of the work. This improves overall worker moral, which also increases quality of work.
Overall for business I think this model combined with the changes in insurance coverage going on is going to lead to a shrinking workforce for companies. Inside companies structure becomes more horizontal. The factory style organizational structure becomes less viable and companies holding on to this structure will quickly lose their market share to companies tapping into a mesh business model.
Thanks for checking out this blog series. I hope to explore a mesh business model more in the future. Please let me know what you thoughts are and I will be sure to incorporate it into future post.
Reworked
Posted by admin in Business, Improvement on August 27, 2010
I can’t shake the overwhelming feeling that there is something wrong with business today. Grant it I have been reading books like Linchpin and Rework, but they have been confirming my thoughts rather than introducing radical new concepts. The amount of excess and waste is astonishing and entirely ineffective.
A Story.
An organization I recently did some work with had 5 people in the office. This seems like a fairly waste free office on the surface right? Expect when you start going position by position. You had 2 low pay position, one a financial and one an analyst, a mid range marketing/communications person, a high paid operations person, and director.
Simple.
Except the analyst and marketing person each had about half a job to do, and worked closely with each other. The financial person and the operations person were the same way. The director did next to nothing. 5 positions could have easily become 2. So when I asked this organization why they had 5 the answer was because they had funding for 5, so they may as well use it.
Idiotic.
As a good friend of mine likes to say, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Fast forward a year or so later and that same organization is looking at a financial issue. It seems their budget projections no longer match their requirements. Their solution is to add more people to the organization in hopes of generating more money. They want to shift product offerings and gradually abandon the things that have given them a strong market share to something that has yet to find an audience.
Cart before horse.
This seems to be a common problem I see. Companies get into a pinch and they decide to make radical changes. The first thing they decide is that whatever service or product that got them to this point must be wrong and needs to be dumped for something new. What new offerings do they choose? What they are interested in obviously. They fail to take the step to see if their customers want this new offering.
Man in the mirror.
The next step is to do one of two things, either grow rapidly hoping that more people = more money or remove people hoping that less salary = more money. The problem is that growth is rarely the solution, and the people you remove are typically (not always) not the problem. Sometimes it is that high paid employee who contributes nothing to the organization other than supervision. Bees can still live without the queen, but they starve without the workers.
What if?
What if you had an organization that had a solid product and worked each day on making it better? If that organization hired just what they needed and got the most out of each person, including the CEO/Owner? If before making a move, even small, they asked why, and is this needed? If this organization focused on making work beneficial to everyone (workers, owners, customers) would you want to be a part of it?