The Social Phone doesn’t come with an IVR menu

 customer service, engagement marketing, location, social media marketing  No Responses »
Nov 072011
 
Save the date!

Local Social Summit - London - 9-10 November 2011

When big brands think local

This week sees the third Local Social Summit in London. I’ll be there, curating a panel of great thinkers sharing their views about what happens when national (or international) brands start connecting with their customers at a local level.

Think about it.

The marketing team sit in an obscure corporate headquarters and create the rules around which the brand gets portrayed by the company. Often those rules create absolute positions – fixed views of what people should understand about the brand – that seem to have missed the shift in expectations that the social explosion have started to create in their audience.

Now consider the challenge they face when it comes to interacting locally with that audience. I’d argue that you can’t successfully run that from Corporate HQ – but even if you try to, for large brands, that means a substantial team of people being involved.

And, unlike the typical large organisation, your customer won’t distinguish between ‘Marketing’, ‘PR’ or ‘Customer Service’. They won’t conveniently direct their social call-outs to the part of your organisation that you’d really like them to take it up with. The Social Phone (to borrow a phrase from Radian6) doesn’t come with an IVR menu. (Maybe that’s one reason people go social rather than telephone customer services).

So if that marketing team have any chance of meeting that challenge they need to figure out how to corral the organisation’s responses to the social phone. And so do PR. And Customer Service. And so on.

That means combining a degree of enablement, mentoring and strategy to equip the people on the ground with what they need to respond. And that runs counter to the established wisdom of old-school marketing. Or PR… etcetera.

I’ll be joined by Duncan Ogle-Skan of EMO (who advises his clients’ how to do this), Leanne Tritton who runs PR & Communications agency ING Media, together with Alistair Watts of Hand Picked Hotels and Janis Prescott at Mini UK, both of whom do this for real.

 Posted by Sandlines at 17:30

The most expensive marketing plan ever?

 customer service, engagement marketing  2 Responses »
Nov 122010
 

I’ve just got back from a few days in LA, presenting at Lyris’s Future Vision conference there. Obviously, I flew Air New Zealand from London.

Now I’ll admit, as a kiwi, to being a touch biased. But frankly, this is an airline that takes a completely different view as to why it exists. It’s not just a way of cargo-freighting sardines from one corner of the planet to another, it’s a central part of marketing New Zealand as a whole.

And why not? After all, the main reason you’re likely to fly them is to get to NZ. The airline is a badge of honour for the country, and for tourists the first taste you’ll have of the place. So why not get the experience off to a great start.

The extensive in-flight entertainment module is liberally sprinkled with the best of NZ music and cinema (and I don’t just mean that other expensive tourist video, the Lord of the Rings trilogy). The menu is packed with unashamedly NZ-flavoured meals (NZ Lamb with chick peas…) and a liberally shared wine / beer selection that was extensively steeped in kiwiana.

The in-flight team are not all kiwis, but were all amazing.

And then there was the neat twist on the safety video.

Overall, I loved every minute… and it made me not just want to fly Air New Zealand again whenever I can, but to visit the ‘mother ship’ as well. Great work, guys. That Airline of the Year (2010) award looks spot on to me.

 Posted by Sandlines at 16:50

The anticipation of disappointment

 customer service, engagement marketing  1 Response »
Dec 072009
 

minority reportMany years ago I spent some time discussing online & mobile marketing plans with Blockbuster in the UK, trying to figure out how to apply an appropriate business model for their relatively unusual marketing requirements.

The sticking point for them was what was termed the ‘anticipation of disappointment’. The scenario is this:

  • you are on the train home and decide to reserve a film to view – it’s 2002, so the DVD I want to rent is Minority Report.
  • my local Blockbuster has a dozen copies of this film to rent out
  • there is no way to link (in real time) in-stock DVD rentals with the web (or mobile for that matter

So I’ve decided that I want that film, but I know from experience that I cannot guarantee to get it. As my train journey progresses, I’m anticipating disappointment – and planning for what I will do if all the copies are out.

Now Blockbuster put a lot of time, thought and resource into countering that problem, but is is a significant issue for the business – and they needed a strategy to encourage people to deal with it without losing future custom.

Chanel JadeThere are whole categories of business that do this really well.  Luxury brands are high on that list: Chanel have released a Jade nail varnish that has been the buzz colour of the year:

“Having sold out in 40 minutes (for £16 a pop), Jade is now a collector’s item. Bottles on eBay (possibly placed there by impoverished beauty editors since hardly anyone else managed to get hold of it) are fetching £84.”

Similarly, Swiss watchmaker extraordinaire, Jean-Claude Biver, who runs Hublot strongly believes in creating scarcity. In boom times he under-delivered against orders for his highly prized – and priced – watches.

“You only desire what you cannot get,” he says. “People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.”

Hublot has significantly outperformed the Swiss luxury watch market even in the past year – a period that has seen brutal declines of sales figures for his competitors.

tchibo_shopTchibo is one of Germany’s leading retailers. It’s an extraordinary business to British eyes: they completely revise their product range each week on totally different themes, stocking low-cost versions of popular products from luxury watches to laptops to kitchen appliances and clothing. Some of their sales items are enormous bargains, and consumers go out of their way to try and buy one… only to discover that they have sold out, Chanel-style, in the first 40 minutes.

This anticipation of disappointment is part of Tchibo’s brand proposition. It’s the trade-off against exceptional value. I’ve met many Germans who LOVE Tchibo.

I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the high-profile exploitation of scarcity in supply for items Sony Playstations or Xboxes. Variations on the same themes.

But there is a common thread through all of these: the disappointment is part of the brand promise. It underpins part of what makes the brand proposition work. And it is reinforced by a degree of exclusivity: other people make green nail polish, but it’s not Chanel Jade. Other games consoles are available, but it’s the PS3 I really wanted. The difficulty of buying a new Ferrari is part of the mystique around owning one.

Most retailers or suppliers have a different problem. In the Blockbuster case, their answer was to carefully balance supply and demand so that during the first couple of weeks of release, there were sufficient copies of a title on hand to meet the initial surge of interest. They then sold off second-hand copies that were surplus to later requirements… aided by the delay between rental release and full retail release.

Other retailers are less able to deal wtih the problem: my local cornershop in London routinely runs out of the weekend newspaper I want to buy before 10am. The result? I no longer trouble to go there at the weekend because I’m anticipating disappointment. But there is no trade off, just pure frustration.

Too many other organisations fall into this trap. And it breaks the brand promise.

 Posted by Sandlines at 11:41

First Capital Disconnect

 customer service, engagement marketing, Manifesto, social media marketing, targeting, twitter, web 2.0  1 Response »
Nov 122009
 

First Capital Disconnect

I’ve long thought of  First Capital Connect’s ‘thamselink’ service as the train line that time forgot. So I was quite surprised earlier this year when they launched a potentially great Twitter service, promising that, if you tell them where you travel to and from, they will direct tweet service announcements that affect your journey.

The direct tweets generate and email and a text message to give me more-or-less instant notification of problems, so I can plan around them. This is a great customer service/marketing promise… I signed up.

I’ve since had all kinds of updates about stuff happening at opposite ends of their service, on trains that have no connection with my own little branch line. Oh well, you come to expect disappointment from train services I guess. Not the end of the world, just somewhat spammy.

This week, I’ve tried to use their trains on four separate occasions, only to discover that, for reasons that have gone unexplained (unexpected autumn leaf falls?), they have been unable to offer trains. Or, it seems, notifications on their twitter feed.

I’d never seek to discourage organisations from trying new things to improve their customer service or perception – and I strongly believe that the types of service messages First Capital Connect promised show enormous promise.

But if you make a promise, you have to keep it.

My frustration at the cancelled trains is severely compounded by the failure of the train company to keep their notification promise. I’d not have like the cancellation anyway, but would have been impressed with their ability to advise me ahead of time and therfore allow me to make other plans.

In the language of tweets, #fail


*===* UPDATE *===*

(no) more trains?

(no) more trains?

(12th November, noon) – I’ve found out why First Capital Connect are in such a bad way: they’re suffering from industrial action. They’ve even devised a new timetable. They just haven’t bothered to tell any of their twitter followers (to my knowledge) about this. Genius.

Oh – and it turns out compensation can be claimed at their website. Maybe that’s why they’re not telling anyone?

 Posted by Sandlines at 10:38  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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