Comments

Amen -- reaping what you sow. In other words, creating an expectation that your customers will surely enforce upon you.

My sister was a super-effective middle-school English teacher for many years. (Think that over: teaching literature and grammar to a bunch of adolescents with molten-lava emotions.) Now she's a school librarian. Often she'll hear complaints from teachers about how "bad" their classes are -- or apologies for how wild the kids are when they come in to work on projects in the library.

My sister's blanket response: "That's funny -- they're not bad for me."

The grand difference: EXPECTATIONS. Those kids walk in there and figure out in the first minute that my sis is (a) a lot of fun, but (b) the worst nightmare of a kid who crosses the line. So NOBODY crosses the line. The other teachers may have all the proper rules in the world, they may be good-hearted, they may be really smart. But the kids know quite well how to reap the uncertainty that those teachers sow.

Posted by Tim Walker at December 4, 2007 4:23 PM

Consumers are trained and that training gets reinforced everyday. Once the consumer is trained they will always act to answer that age old question WIIFM.....WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME. The easiest thing for a business is to change price, but then they have no idea of the long term effects of that move. There is a winner and it rarely is the business.

Posted by Jack at December 4, 2007 5:00 PM

Amen! Tim has hit the nail on the proverbial head. Brand = Expectation. Period! End of discussion. Not logo. Not design. Not experience. Not even promise. When leaders get this one mindset clear - including our political leaders - then they'll get their collective acts together.

Posted by Tom Asacker at December 4, 2007 5:29 PM

That may be true for Ford and GM, but I don't recall seeing many ads for deep discounts at Lexus, Porsche or BMW. My guess is that they intuitively understand that marketing is about more than just promoting the sale, it's about engaging your customers and connecting them emotionally to their product.

Another example is the PC industry. I get about half a dozen promotional emails, catalogs, filers, etc., every week from Dell, HP and the like. Almost all of them are promoting their newest latest $399 desktop and $599 laptop. Apple, on the other hand, recently held a sale where I think the lowest price for one of their machines was still over $1000. I recently bought a new MacBook laptop at full price from our local Apple store and felt better about the purchase than I did about the last machine I bought from Dell at about 2/3 the price. Apple gets that it is about their customer experience and constantly exceeding their expectations.

Tom Asacker, I agree with you that brand is about expectation, but brand loyalty is about all of the other things you mention. Design is critical. Experience with the product/vendor tells me whether I want another one and price becomes considerably less of a factor when you have all of these things. I keep telling people that brand loyalty is not rocket science, but a bit more like brain surgery. You have to get inside your customer's head.

I expect certain brands to give me deep discounts in order to get me to buy, but I'll shop them and their competitors every time to see what is the best deal I can get. The brands that I am loyal to, however, are the ones that make me want to buy their product, and only their product, again and again (I bought my first Mac in 1986).

Posted by Andrew Hayden at December 4, 2007 9:22 PM

I'm with you Andrew. The expectation I have from Sony is different than the one I have from Dell. I own both brands. I also own a Toyota, hardly a luxury brand, and they don't offer discounts either. Why? They know what their audience expects, because they created that expectation over time, and discount isn't part of it.

Posted by Tom Asacker at December 4, 2007 9:51 PM

It's like we've trained customers when to shop and when to stay home, based on discounts and advertising.

Seems like consumers are empowered.

Posted by Dan Schawbel at December 4, 2007 10:26 PM

Widening this slightly I throw away 99.9% (probably under-estimated)of the glossy c**p junk mail I receive in the mail without even glancing at it. I suggest we customers are far more discerning than marketing people seem to think. A word of mouth recommendation beats 1000 of these useless leaflets. How come marketing professionals don’t see what we all see?

Posted by Trevor Gay at December 5, 2007 6:48 AM

Totally with you Trevor. It's amazing how many meetings I have sat in where people have really tried hard to craft a letter or communication that doesn't sound like marketing BS. It never works - it always comes out like marketing BS.

There is an evil force in the world that turns normal human beings into BS spouting idiots - it's called Fear

The fear of doing something different - the fear of not conforming to business or corporate norms. The fear of being human. Usually backed by a vague term like professionalism.

Posted by PaulH at December 5, 2007 7:47 AM

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it." - Stephen Leacock

Posted by Mark JF at December 5, 2007 8:28 AM

I hear you PaulH. Often, the only communications that can get approved sound like marketing BS.

Stuff that sounds like one person talking to another, well, that's 'not businesslike.' Or 'not hard-hitting enough.'

So we end up with that pompous sound of a corporation talking to a vertical.

That's an opportunity for an upstart that can sound human.

Posted by Walt Kania at December 5, 2007 8:37 AM

Timely, as always. I need to replace my vehicle soon. I am happy with what I had, but in Chrysler's divine wisdom, they dropped the model. I really want to give Ford a chance as they were an extremely good client for years. My bro in law has the Edge, and it is impressive, except for fit and finish issues. (my contention is if they cant get the sheet metal seams equally spaced, can I really trust them to build an engine where there is far less tolerance for error?) I strayed from Infiniti to give the big three a chance, but suspect I will go back to Infiniti or Nissan. I know I may be a bit weird here, but I won't buy a car if the salesman tries to sell me the extended warranty. The message to me is they know I am going to have problems. And as the price of vehicles goes up, I want the design to make a statement. Forget the rebates - just tells me you don't know how to price your vehicles in the first place - and if you are not competent to do that, why should I trust your competency to design and build a vehicle. 30-50K for a vehicle is not a commodity!! You gotta wow me...

Posted by Mike Neiss at December 5, 2007 11:09 AM

One Word.... "OUCH!!!!!!" Being around technology most of my professional life, this goes right to the bone. Customers know when it is end of month or end of a quarter. Thanks for the painful reminder! :-)
That is why I agree with you that we need to continue to reinvent and go beyond customer expectation.

Posted by Cyle Dibble at December 5, 2007 2:07 PM

Trevor, Paul, Mark, Walt, et al, You bring up a very good point about the preponderance of marketing BS, and how any of it ever sees the light of day. My answer, in a word; Ego.

I have spent most of my career developing and managing global marketing programs for a number of companies, large and small and it never ceases to amaze me the lengths to which people will go to make sure they are heard in a campaign. I remember one time we had built a wonderfully articulate, simple and elegant program to launch a new product. That is until the lead project executive got involved and started to make changes and additions that left the program bearing little resemblance to the original. My boss (who had a technical background but was getting "experience" in marketing in order to move up the corporate ladder) defended the other exec saying that his additions "really didn't change the program all that much - after all we're still using the same product photography". The result was a mastery of irrelevant marketing BS.

The same thing happens in almost every area of communications. Some technical, financial or "business" manager gets involved in the process and strips any sense of "communication" out of the marketing piece. It's even worse when it has to go through a committee review. What usually comes out is complete rubbish and even programs that I was responsible for I've thrown in the trash when I received them in the mail.

I'm not sure it's so much a case of fear of not conforming to corporate norms as much as it is the result of an unwillingness by many to let other people have control of something.

As an example on the flip side, however, SAS has a brilliant campaign going on right now that uses images of, and facts about, woodland creatures to sell enterprise software. The only reason the campaign exists is because one executive had the courage to throw out a proposed program that had been developed and researched for six months (and nearly focus grouped to death) and tell the team to come up with something completely different and if it was approved by the CEO it would run essentially unaltered. If you haven't seen it, take a look. It's a great example of what happens when the bureaucracy gets taken out of the process.

Posted by Andrew Hayden at December 5, 2007 2:19 PM

I agree with about 100% of the sentiment expressed above, and I have long been on the case of marketers. But I would offer a couple of words of warning. Whether UNICEF or "crap," direct mail does work, or, at least, can work. And, like it or not, done right, pays for itself. For a decade I had a newsletter--an expensive one which eventually reached 10,000 in subscriptions. That was my introduction to direct mail--I was amazed at the enormous monthly reports I'd get. The marketers, totally data driven, would fool with this list or that, tweak here or there, and eventually hit paydirt. I get a ton of junk mail too--and "toss before reading" is my motto. But, truth be told, now and again something catches my eye. For example, I took a second look (glance) at one of the many mailings about alumni trips sent by my alma mater; next thing you know, I'd signed up for a several thousand $$$ trip. I also don't think I'm a sucker in this regard. I am not pushing direct mail, but I will conclude by saying sans direct mail, a huge share of worthy non-profits would tank in short order.

Posted by tom peters at December 5, 2007 4:15 PM