A 'rewarding' catalogue – for customers and employees

Every so often, Glue receives a catalogue from the premiums and incentives organization 4imprint. What is commendable about this selling tool is that they not only have very clear photos and pricing info about their wares, they also subtly sell their own corporate culture.

They do this by frequently having their own employees holding or wearing the merchandise, and by naming the employees (first name only) along with their years of employment with the company.

What a great way to foster employee pride and drive engagement while helping customers see the product in a realistic setting. Bravo!

When book shopping time is short...

Despite the best efforts of customer service rep. Steve at the Chapters / Indigo store at Manulife Centre, the two copies of The Challenger Sale: Taking Control Of The Customer Conversation by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon that their website showed as in-stock were both on customer holds and thus unavailable.

At this point, the ever-trusty AbeBooks.com digitally rides to the rescue!

Not only was I able to order the book noted above, but also Achieve Sales Excellence: The 7 Customer Rules for Becoming the New Sales Professional by Howard Stevens and Theodore Kinni.

Expected delivery time: should be less than 8 days for both books!

The collapsing distinction between promotion and information

Yesterday, on my favourite radio interview program (CBC Radio's show Q), host Jian Ghomeshi  intreviewed Hayley Phelan, Fashion News Editor at Fashionista.com about her online story, 'Can You Trust the Editorial Integrity of Personal Style Blogs? A Closer Look at How Bloggers Make Money.'

The segment got me thinking about the larger issues of ‘independent thought’ and the blurring of ‘promotion’ and ‘information’ in contemporary culture.

Witness the growing popularity of advertorials in reputable newspapers and magazines, in which corporations or special interest groups pay to have ‘editorially formatted copy’ written about them to surround their advertisements, all bearing such headings as ‘sponsored supplement’ or ‘special information feature.’

Count the number of well-known brands that we are exposed to in a typical Hollywood movie or TV show. Product placement is big business.

The burgeoning field of branded content, accelerated by social media, involves brands creating their own editorial or entertainment-style programming that, to a greater or lesser extent, allows them to focus attention on their own products without the clutter of competing brands.

The prevalence of celebrity endorsements for products ranging from fragrances to fast food suggests that many consumers crave reassurance or status when making purchasing decisions.

For me, the most practical way to cope these days is to carefully choose brands that you identify with and trust, whether it’s a newspaper (in my case, The Globe and Mail), a clothing retailer (L.L. Bean) or a line of haircare products (whatever my stylist at Fiorio on Bayview recommends). 

Just don’t expect that your choices will yield “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

How would your employees handle a 'pop-up show'?

An organization's internal culture is one of its most important and precious assets (or liabilities, as the case may be.) 

Because culture is so intangible, it can be hard to assess – and harder still to first establish or to change. But there's little doubt that culture has an enormous influence on how successfully employees collaborate with one another and how effectively they interact with customers.

Consider the role of corporate culture in the situation recently cited by Globe and Mail columnist John Warrillow in his article about the unexpected appearance of a 'pop-up' piano performance in a retail environment. Would your staff feel right thanking the pianist with the gift card, or would they feel it necessary to quash the fun? 

Virgin's Richard Branson, in a Canadian Business column on customer service excellence, advocates 'first to know, first to handle'; empowering employees who first encounter a problem to make every effort to solve it on the spot.

In these days of greater demand for top talent, be sure to unleash the best instincts of your people by fostering and reinforcing a positive organizational culture.

  

How employees can help put the 'corner store' feeling back in retailing

In the current issue of the American Marketing Association's Marketing News magazine, columnist Don E. Schultz suggests that today's shoppers long for the intimacy and caring service once provided at their local butcher, baker or dairy deliveryman.

He contends that retailers wishing to survive in today's hyper-competitive environment must possess three attributes:

• Fast: Like Spanish clothing retailer Zara, merchants need to respond quickly to changing consumer tastes.

• Friendly: Like the Apple store where employees are taught not to sell, retailers need friendly people, friendly products, friendly atmosphere and friendly shopping.

• Focused: Here, Schultz cites online retailer Zappos as having narrowed its mission to one thing, namely making customer service their true competitive differentiator.

I believe that retail employees – as well as their managers – play a key role in delivering on these priorities:

• Fast: Employees can listen carefully to customer comments and requests on the floor of the store; pay attention to market trends on their own as consumers; then feed their insights back to the company to accelerate innovation. (For this to be successful, the company needs an easy system for collecting such feedback, and needs to build receptiveness for such employee engagement into its culture.)

• Friendly: Employees are chiefly responsible for providing customers with helpful and friendly service. Staff need to understand the products they sell, and know the store's policies on returns, exchanges and the like. (This means that management should provide adequate employee training about products and service delivery, and should consider some form of recognition program to motivate employees to deliver the best customer experience.)

• Focused: Identifying the company's focus – then communicating it to employees in a manner that they can act upon it – is a prime responsibility of management.

AMA members may read the full article by clicking here.

Achieving prosperity through design (and how marketing helps)

There's plenty of talk these days about the need for Canadian business to increase its productivity in order to thrive in the ruthlessly competitive 21st century. Put more bluntly, it seems that companies must either innovate or face extinction.

Innovation can be defined as the act of applying new or different knowledge and skills in order to solve problems. And based on my early studies in architecture school, the practice of innovation is synonymous with the discipline of design.

Regrettably, many people equate design with 'styling' – the surface appearance or visual appeal of an object. But as I alluded to in an earlier blog, great design involves much more than merely visual delight.

I believe that great design involves the development of creative solutions that effectively address all the relevant needs of all the relevant constituents connected with the problem at hand. As trained problem-solvers, designers are adept at considering and balancing these often-competing needs and perspectives.

For instance, suppose a designer is developing a new smartphone. The relevant constituents  would begin with the phone's end-user(s), then its purchaser, then the retailer who sold the phone, the wholesaler who shipped and warehoused the phone, the manufacturer who built the phone, and potentially even the communities where the raw materials used to create the phone were extracted. All have a stake in the overall quality of the design solution.

More obviously, our phone designer would need to consider all the relevant needs of these diverse stakeholders. Again using our smartphone example, this involves not only how good the phone looks (its aesthetic or 'cultural' appeal) and how well it works (its functionality), but also how cost-efficiently the phone was manufactured and packaged, and how big an environmental footprint it leaves (the choice and quantity of materials used in its manufacturing, its energy consumption during operation, and the ease of its disposal at the end of its working life).

Such a broad perspective of considerations can – and should – be applied to the development of intangible services as well as the creation of tangible goods.

So where does marketing fit into all of this? As 'experts on the consumer,' marketers have the task of identifying – ideally anticipating – the needs or wants of the consumer, then translating these into a clear problem statement that designers can easily work with. Then, once the product or service has been completed, marketers lead the charge in launching and promoting it in the marketplace, helping drive consumer engagement and ultimately sales on behalf of  'the client.'


If Canada is serious about boosting our national productivity and fostering innovation, then I believe design need a stronger role in the equation. Getting corporations (and other organizations, for that matter) to recognize and appreciate the vital contribution that talented designers can make to their success is one of today's most pressing challenges.

Duh, it's about the customer!

Kudos to Alexa Samuels for laying bare the dangers of not being customer-centric when creating your communications – Is your marketing making the customer think too much?

Begin with the mindset of: Where's my customer's head at regarding my product? and you will, at minimum, prevent customers from bypassing your message since they'll recognize themselves in your piece. At best, you will have gained new brand advocates since you've solved a problem for them and demonstrated respect for their intelligence and time.

On the other hand, if you launch your communications thinking: Hey everyone out there, lemme tell you all my detailed news!, you will likely confuse people who aren't as close to things as you, or worse, create a lasting negative impression of your brand.

Remember the old saw that it takes 100 contacts to create a good impression, but just one to break it!

How to judge the quality of your constituent communications

Prefer to WATCH this message on YouTube? Click here...

Back in the late 1970s, when I was studying architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, I was introduced to the phrase: "Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight," which was co-authored by English author and diplomat Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639), in his work The Elements of Architecture (1624; a free translation of Vitruvius' de Architectura).

In essence, the phrase "commodity, firmness and delight" means that an excellent work of architecture is functional (the size and arrangement of its spaces meet the practical needs of its users); well built (it uses materials and technology wisely and efficiently); and pleasing to the eye (it is beautiful or meets the intangible needs of its users).

Since my career has transitioned away from architecture, I've become convinced that  all marketing-communications 'artefacts' (whether in print, digital or live media) can also be judged by these same three, time-tested criteria.

In other words, I suggest we should ask ourselves the following questions when assessing 'creative' work:

1. Does it accomplish its business objectives – whether that means simply informing, persuading or striving to change behaviour?
2. Is it crafted intelligently – completed in a reasonable time, without excessive expenditure, and in a suitably durable yet environmentally friendly manner?
3. Does it connect with people and touch their hearts – or at least speak to them as human beings rather than as 'automatons' programmed only to consume?

I just discovered that there's a toolkit called the Design Quality Indicator, first developed in the UK, devoted to assessing the quality of buildings according to Wotton's big-three. The DQI toolkit is solely distributed in North America by DQI USA, LLC, which even has a YouTube commercial promoting the toolkit!

Perhaps it's time to approach internal stakeholder communications with this same broad yet disciplined perspective? If so, let's talk...

Why traditional advertising struggles with social media

Always wise columnist Don E. Schultz, writing in Marketing News's July 30, 2010 issue, p. 11 (getting this biweekly mag free is another reason to join AMA Toronto!), notes that traditional advertising is about persuasion – getting consumers "to accept the value of our products and to agree with our arguments."

He contrasts this with the Chinese view of marketing communications – "as a tool for negotiation: to create situations to be considered, thought about, bargained for and haggled over... One might call it reciprocity, which, at the end, provides equal value to the buyer and the seller."

He notes that we in North America "increasingly live in a negotiated marketplace, one in which negotiated media forms such as social media, blogs, the Internet and interactivity are increasingly important... The persuasion approach doesn't fit [here] and it's unlikely it ever will... Negotiated media brings people together, not just for purposes of selling something to someone, but to create sharing, conversations and relationships."

To me, the article neatly explains why advertising is struggling today, and how the shifting balance of power between marketer and consumer will create a fairer exchange of value for all. Ideally, this trend will enable marketers to feel prouder of our profession and of our key contribution to society!

Building a customer-centred business

Some solutions on how to put the customer at the centre of your organization.

I was pleased to participate as one of nine panelists in a kitchen-table dialogue on June 23, 2010 – led by moderator Alan Kay of The Glasgow Group and hosted by Rick Wolfe of PostStone Corporation – about how companies can get past thinking about brands and become truly customer-centred.



Examples of organizations that are considered customer-centred

• Tim Horton’s – a brand that’s become an icon by tapping into the Canadian experience.
• Life Choice Foods – a virtual company that offers top-quality kid-friendly organic foods.
• Amazon – an online retailer that understands past purchase patterns and presents relevant recommendations.
• Zappos – an online retailer with an explicit set of family core values.
• Zip (Netflix in the U.S.) – an easy-to-use, hassle-free home DVD rental service.
• Best Buy – uses information from employees to better understand customer preferences.
• L.L. Bean – a retailer offering guaranteed customer satisfaction across all touchpoints.

Some barriers to putting customers at the centre

• Leadership bias – CEOs/CFOs do not generally gain exposure to a customer mindset in their education or their career path. 
• Insufficient analytics – despite plenty of data, few businesses seem to have succeeded in integrating all their information to compile a realistic 360-degree view of their customers’ value to the business.  
• Organizational structure – with the Marketing department owning the brand in many ‘siloed’ organizations, it’s hard to get the entire business focused on the customer. The job of a traditional leader is to provide predictable results to shareholders, and organizations have been narrowly structured to ensure profitability.

Some solutions for being customer-centric

* Begin with the business’s existing information resources, use business intelligence to identify and understand the most valuable customers, then ask them how you can best meet their needs. (We’ve never had more capability to identify and understand customers.)

* Don’t start with your widget and then look for customers; instead, start further upstream by ask a group of prospects what they need, then design the widget accordingly.

* Start by being employee-centric:

• Hire the right staff. (North America tends to value ‘talkers’ instead of ‘listening,’ which needs to be built into the company’s value system.) 
• Inform them about the company’s progress.
• Value them by asking for their input.
• Report back to them on what you’re doing with their input (or explain why you’re not doing something.) 
• Reward them for their successes. 

* Leverage a ‘use-case process’ (a user-centric perspective, drawn from the software business) in thinking about the business:

• Who are our various users?
• Why are they coming? 
• Where are they coming from? 
• What are they trying to do? 
• How long do they stay (determined using today’s metrics)?

* Remember the singular, customer-focused vision of some of the great entrepreneurs (e.g., Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Steve Jobs of Apple; Ray Kroc of McDonald’s). But things get tough when the leader passes the torch. After a few years in the value of death after the death of Sam Walton, Lee Scott of Wal-Mart transformed the company’s focus on eliminating waste to cut prices into a focus on environmental sustainability.

* A customer-centric vision must be strongly held and acted upon by the senior leadership team, but then ‘given up’ by the leadership team and handed over to people in the organization for their input. Ask them four questions:

1. Where did our company come from? (where were we yesterday?)
2. What are we today? (how do we appear to you now?)
3. Where should we be in five years? (what would you like us to be?)
4. Do you have any ideas of how we’ll get there?

Senior leaders should be sponsors who clear barriers, but not run the team. With this autonomy, the teams will spend money responsibly to help address the improvement opportunities.

* Thanks to social media today, we can listen to millions of people for their ideas. Make the customer the expert in the changes they want made. However, be conscious of how you’ll use the input you gain!

* Be conscious of what you’re selling: the tangible product (which doesn’t change), versus the brand (which is fluid).

On brands and branding

• “A brand is not what you think you are, but what they (the customer) think you are.”
• “The brand is the value we give our customers; it’s what we stand for with them. If we can consistently present this message throughout the organization at all levels, then everyone will gets it; this is what we’re about.”

Some quotable quotes

• “Being customer-centric is a lot of work, and you can’t lie. You have to make real connections; you can’t hide behind your desk. It takes courage.”
• “Don’t confuse the ‘scoreboard’ with the ‘game.’ Profit is the scoreboard, and it’s more important to some than to others. But the game – for instance, providing nutrition to the mass market in Canada – is what’s important. If we play the game well, the score will take care of itself. The customer-focused game is what we should be take pride in.”
• “Don’t suck up [to your boss], suck down [by telling your boss what your people have done].

 Some further reading

• "But what do we want people to do?" Article by Andy Gould in AdAge: http://bit.ly/9rgP2Y 

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