Marketing

Complaining Cleverly

If approached properly, a complaint can turn into a discussion can turn into a process improvement can turn into a case study. Everybody wins.

Are you being clever with complaints?

Surprise – Disrespecting Competitors Doesn’t Work!

Expo2008: Squared & Diagonal You have a product. It’s an awesome product. Thousands of people use it; share its strengths; promote the heck out of it; evangelize about it to anyone who has a question about that product.

It becomes? a benchmark. When someone mentions the service or platform your product is built for, it’s almost the de facto recommendation.

Truth: pretty much everyone in your niche loves your product.

Then a new player comes into town.

They’ve seen what your product can do. They know its strengths, yet they know it’s one key area where improvement could happen – user-friendliness. While your product is unquestionably solid and respected, it’s not the easiest to use for the everyday person on the street.

It needs extra work that not everyone can afford to put the time into. It needs skills that not everyone has, or can learn. That’s not a weakness; just reality. The new player has seen that, and has released a product that makes it just as easy for Joe Average to use as Joe Expert. Everybody’s happy. Experts can still use your product, while the average consumer can use your competitor’s – there’s room for everyone, after all.

Except there’s not, according to you. Instead of relishing the challenge, and letting your product speak for itself, you decide it’s more productive to put down your competitor instead. You talk about your competitor’s design knowledge and denounce it by saying, “Company X don’t know jack about it or care, either.” Despite the clear opposite.

You publicly call your competitor’s promotional plans “lame, uninspired and barnacle marketing”. Even though the competitor’s marketing has so far been purely from user recommendation – much like the users of your product recommend yours (and rightly so).

Is this the new form of product selling? Putting down the competitors in public? I was curious, so I asked the question whether you should put competitors down or let your product do the talking. The responses were pretty unilateral.

Kevin Richard says you should wow your customers and let them do the talking. Arik Hanson advises that disrespect can have a long-term impact on your reputation. Justin Levy thinks you should save time and effort by not dissing your competitors and use it instead to make your company and product better.

There are numerous? other examples from Rebecca Leaman, Peter Hodges, PRDude, Tina Marie Hilton, Mike Smith, Ari Herzog, John Haydon, Tim Jahn, David Holliday, Andi Narvaez, Leona Skene, Nan Palmero, Jenn Mattern, Al Tepper and Michael Pearson.

Seems pretty simple – your product is your response to competition. Anything else is just poor form.

Of course, you might not even care anyway. Your sales pitch points to the high profile users that your product resonates with. The popularity of these guys will continue to sell your product for you.

But will it? Reputations take a long time to build but they can fall in seconds. Will the high profile customers persuade the general public to buy your product when that same public starts to notice the conversations taking place about competitor respect? Will they want to risk their own brand by supporting yours?

Maybe. Maybe not. But is it a question you’re willing (or can afford) to find out the answer to?

photo credit: tochis

Marketing the Bruce Campbell Way

MY NAME IS BRUCE I was asked this question on Twitter this morning: “If your brand was a person, who would it be?”, to which my response was Bruce Campbell.

(For anyone who doesn’t know who Bruce Campbell is, he’s a legendary B-movie actor).

Originally my answer was from a fun point of view, because I love the guy – his expressions in his movies crack me up; I’ve just finished reading Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way and it’s a hoot; and the guy is simply part of the teenage years that helped make me who I am today. So, he’s a big influence, if you like.

Yet then I started thinking more about why Bruce stuck out for me, out of all the cheesy actors that I grew up with – and there were many! And that got me to thinking that maybe he had a subconscious part to play in me choosing? marketing as my vocation…

Define the Brand

For any Bruce Campbell fans, you know what you’re going to get. Wisecracks, slapstick humour, cheesy lines, a huge dose of belly laughs and the feeling that the guy he plays will just never get the breaks he deserves. He has a certain style and that’s in every movie he does (even the more serious ones).

If you confuse your customers, you can put them off your product and send them to your competitors. Video game company Sega used to be one of the most successful around – the Genesis is still one of the most successful platforms ever. Then they tried to offer too much.

Add-on platforms like the Sega Mega-CD and 32X, combined with non-clear plans about the future direction of the company, eventually saw them pull out of hardware development and simply become a publisher. Their name was tarnished and they’ve struggled to regain the success they once enjoyed.

Takeaway: Choice is good, but confusion is dangerous. Be innovative but be smart.

Offer Value

If there’s one thing that Bruce Campbell excels at, it’s the after-the-event approach he takes. When a movie’s made, studios usually have the final word on what makes the cut. They also butcher scenes that leaves the viewer asking what the heck was going on there.

When that movie makes its way to DVD, Bruce has shown himself to be more than happy to provide a huge amount of commentary and extras. Check out the DVD versions of the Evil Dead movies, or My Name is Bruce, or The Man with the Screaming Brain, or Bubba Ho-Tep as just some great examples.

It's the little things that matter

Customers (and I’m one too) love value. We don’t mind paying extra if we can see that it’s offering extra value and benefits to us. Or cross market us – that works too. Restaurants offer a movie-and-a-meal deal, for instance, where you pay a set amount, you get a starter and an entree and a free movie ticket. You finish your meal, you go see a movie. Perfect mix for a night out, no?

Takeaway: Cheap can get you fire-sales, but value-added can get you loyalty and repeat business.

Be Your Fans

Maybe it’s because of his B-movie sensibilities, or maybe it’s just because he’s a genuinely nice guy, but Bruce Campbell seems to take extra effort in looking after his fans.

From DVD extras, to the fun he has with them on the road during convention season, to the shout-outs he gives to them in his writing – Bruce is the man when it comes to remembering who put him where he is. The reason? He’s a fan himself – he genuinely loves the B-movie craft and ingenuity and the fans that mix in that genre, and treats fans the way he wants to be treated as a fan too.

If you’re not a fan of either your business or your customers, you may as well pack it in and go work a normal 9-5 job for a non-descript boss somewhere. This is your dream; your baby; the justification of long nights, of hard times and Hamburger Helper meals. But it’s not just you.

Your employees make your success every day. Your customers continue that success. Make them fans too. Make them love your company and product as if it’s one of their own. Involve them; let them help you nurture your baby; offer ideas and feedback. Fans can be fickle, but they can also be incredibly loyal – make sure you’re not the collector of the former.

Takeaway: You can buy success, but earned success will pay back in a hundred-fold.

Marketing can be a funny game. Often you come up with a great idea only to realize it’s not actually all that great after all. The key is adaptability coupled with innovation, yet also tried and trusted methods.

B-movies are very much like this, and the key players involved some of the most creative around because of it. Bruce Campbell epitomizes how lasting appeal can come from the least likely of sources. One of his most popular catchphrases is “Groovy”.

Are you keeping things groovy?

photo credit: blakespot
photo credit: Thorsten Becker

Toasted Bagels and the Art of Good Business

Light and dark. Every morning, I make the same breakfast. I’ll put the coffee on, then make myself an egg bagel. Pop the bagel in the toaster, fry up a couple of eggs, and good to go. Except it’s not.

Every morning, without fail, my smoke alarm goes off. “Adjust the toaster,” you might say. I did, and still the alarm goes off. “Cook the eggs on a lesser heat,” another good suggestion. Which I’ve tried. And still the damn alarm goes off.

Off course, it being a smoke alarm, I can’t adjust the sensitivity on it – too unsafe, right? Or is it? Couldn’t the manufacturers allow for sectioned adjustments, say one at a time until the problem is solved? There’s a big difference between cooker smoke and fire smoke, after all.

That got me to thinking how user-friendly we are to our customers.

Look at the iPod. Officially, you can’t replace the battery on it when it runs out, you need to have an authorized dealer do this. There are plenty of solutions online so you don’t need to go the official route, but why make it so much of a runaround in the first place?

The same goes for some laptops, other consumer electronics, customer queries and more. Basically, we’re not making things easy for the end user – instead, we’re pissing them off. Why?

To me that says, “We’re Company X and we think you’re too stupid to act for yourself. You will always need us around – get used to it.” How can that be good for business?

Look at the recent Zappos sale to Amazon. Zappos are known for having an amazing culture that makes everything easy, from employee satisfaction to customer sales and follow-up service. The result? A whopping $847 million purchase. Ease-of-use encourages success.

We’re smart people. We know when not to mess with things, but we also know what we’re capable of dealing with. If I can use a product, I should (mostly) be able to amend that product’s settings for my own personal use.

Otherwise, is there even any point to your product to start with?

photo credit: hfabulous