Wow time flies and I realised I hadn’t updated anything here in the blog. All my online time seems to be going into the internal Budd wiki, the LimeBridge discussion forum, Twittering and keeping up to date through Twitter links, Linked In updates and connections, Facebook for private stuff and now lots of interesting discussions on Linked In groups, notably in PPF and ICS groups
When do I get any work done….. One thing for sure is that I’d pay for a lot for a reliable high speed internet service either mobile or at home. So often I’m on pause.
The most interesting discussion was when I posted a “dream” – that in 10 years we wouldn’t need customer service as everyone would have copied people like Amazon and Skype and reduced it, in absurdem, to not neccessary. Wow some people didn’t like that. I’ve just kicked off another dream – that in 10 years we wont need marketing – “marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable!”
So what is most interesting from all this chattering?
1) Most people don’t live online – but those that do are learning exponentially faster than those that don’t. Is the gap important?
2) Arranging stuff at home is moving into facebook, thro small apps like events – still looking for a good tennis club app if anyone knows one? Anyone seen a “run a tennis club quiz” app?
3) Voice of customer is there on social and that’s useful, fast, two way – a lead indicator. Some senior people are using it to bypass their cumbersome VoC mechanisms at work.
4) The major step change of power from social business is not really understood yet. Social media isn’t just a way to speed up some stuff we do today. It invents new ways of doing stuff we don’t yet do but find useful when we can.
5) People are just sussing out that only if you are genuine, transparent, authentic, honest in real life can you be that online and succeed there. Your values and how you live them are everything.
6) We are yet to see the real jump from social – inversion of power from companies to customers. But it’s coming. Take a look at the inititiaves on mydata from the government. Friends at Ctrl-Shift, have been talking about it for 10 years already in a think tank called “Buyer Centric Commerce” which I joined early this century. Alan Mitchell had a dream and wrote a book called Right Side Up way back when and the group formed around this.
Is his dream going to happen in the next 10 years – you bet. In the next 2 or3 ? Hmmmm an important question. Are you considering it?
Here’s a few links to get you going
The Cabinet Office and the white paper on Better Choices, Better Deals
The 2011 Netpromoter benchmarks report does say lots of obvious things. But that can be useful when said with numbers. Take this parargraph:
“Businesses are expected to spend $214.3 billion on advertising in 2011, according to SNL Kagan. But only 4 percent of Americans trust advertising the most as an information source when choosing products or services. Instead, the Satmetrix study finds that consumers most trust recommendations from independent sources (83 percent), especially those with whom they have personal relationships. Half of consumers (50 percent) cited personal recommendations from friends, family or colleagues as the most trustworthy source of information. And, approximately four times as many people trusted product test reviews (18 percent) or consumer opinions posted online (15 percent) as compared to advertising.”
So here’s one to discuss with your board colleagues…… the exam question is “What would the business look like if we spent 83/4 times, let’s say 20 times, as much on improving the colleague and customer experience as we do on marketing our brand or product?”
Anyone who has played with business simulators will know that more advertising of a poor performing service or product just leads to a worsening economic cycle – higher acquisition costs, higher cost to serve, low retention. Word of mouth reality outstrips advertising glitz.
And the opposite is true. Businesses like Amazon, Google ,eBay and Skype took off and stay up there without much, if any, advertising support. You can read more about Amazon and Google in our “100 things you can learn from …” series at our website.
Aviva’s Big Picture campaign is a great piece of marketing. Lots of the latest thinking in marketing brought together: emotion, engagement, story telling, charity, change the world, word of mouth.
You’re asked to send in your picture and story and if chosen you may get your picture on a large building somewhere in the world. And a £1 will get donated to a worthy cause – cue pictures of school children and third world underprivileged on behalf of Save The Children. The web site shows a huge picture on the side of Sea Containers House by the Thames – this picture strangely applies in Paris, Singapore and Warsaw, Delhi and Mumbai links as well – obviously didn’t get that far yet. Multiple full pages in the London papers I’ve noticed over the past few days too.
But when you look at it more carefully, is there something missing from this brilliant marketing campaign?
£250,000 in donations in total. against what must be tens of millions on the campaign? The balance of interest is evident.
Save The Children don’t mention the campaign on their site. Was anyone thinking about them, or just about Aviva?
The “rules” page says “This page has been created for a wide audience and although we’re an insurance company, that isn’t intended to be the focus here.” The language is interesting – audience vs community.
You can’t post comments at the website, only vetted posts. The Facebook page doesn’t let you comment unless you’ve posted a picture, neatly filtering the dialogue. Is there any genuine interaction going on here. The posts are sooo complimentary. The site is at pains to say its not about Aviva, But how can Aviva hear its customers talking to each other about the issues of Save The Children?
Maybe one or two features of great marketing are missing – transparency and a genuine interest beyond the brand
What would this campaign look like if Innocent or Ben & Jerry ran it? Give the tens of millions to the charity and spend £250k letting people make videos of what it does. Give the wall space to Save The Children and let them spread their message with a small cred for Innocent in the corner. Get the same impact without spending the millions and concentrate on making a better return from their pensioners rather than their shareholders?
Have you ever struggled with technology? Software crashed, got error messages that make no sense? Didn’t know which button to press next?
Well, it seems it may not be all your fault. David Pogue (technology reviewer for the New York Times) has that story.
Many of us are guilty of not making our services easy to understand and simple to use. Intimidating and confusing IVR interactions, complex transactions and fragmented organisational structures all serve to frustrate customers.
Thank goodness not all customers try to express their feelings in song. But, it is no less important to listen out for customer feedback through all channels and touch points just because it comes in less entertaining wrappers!
As David Pogue rightly say, “simplicity sells” – a message none of us can afford to ignore.
When does advertising get wasted? When it’s blown away by the product its on maybe …
2 examples:
When it came to buying phones I never noticed for years that Vodafone sponsored my fav team Man U. In fact I do now use Vodafone but that wasnt me who did the procurement
This great Bob Dylan video clip – its masterful http://www.dylanmessaging.com/ . A great case of the viral trick being so strong you ignore the ads. But even as Dylan fan who has used it a dozen time this week I havent been tempted to look at the music it advertises – WHY NOT?
Last week I was talking at a tech support conference in Milan about the impact of web2.0 on word of mouth. How fast and deep the word spreads and how it changes the nature of tech support and other industries. A great example came up afterwards.
Someone from Microsoft (MS) told me that they were getting great sat scores on Vista from the customers who were talking to them. But that contact volumes were way down on those predicted. Having heard several comments from colleagues in various countries who have “upgraded” I wasn’t surprised. They wouldn’t go to MS for help given the seriousness of problems they felt had been sold to them in this upgrade. A quick email round the 10 countries we work from showed this to be the case. They were using forums and blogs, anything but talking to MS.
The tech industry often leads the way in terms of how support and contact develops in other industries, so no one can be complacent. Witness the rush to claim compensation from banks and their penalty charges. They didnt try teh banks because they knew they wouldnt listen. But once consumers had a way of getting somewhere through collaboration (enabaled by web2.0) and sharing how to do it, the floodgates opened.
Maybe we need a process called “what our customers are not saying to us”. Or an alert for when traffic doesn’t do what it has done historically – the step function in customer behaviours signal changes of much greater depth than mere frustration
“How does it work? I dont know, its a mystery” as they say in Shakespeare in Love. 21st Century marketing as we reported in January’s newsletter is something which lots of marketing functions are still seeing as the dark arts (see http://www.budd.uk.com/nljan07.html ).
Attached is some interesting data about what some leading lights believe they’ll spend their money on in the virtual world. You can read the ful article at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004532. The bottom line is search marketing and inhouse email lists are better than rented lists and pop ups…..and a whole lot more.
Meanwhile, we’re looking for an out of work comedian to appear in our Kazhakstani customer experience videocasts….. And a process consultant to work in Kazhakstan. Now that’s sysmmetry !
The key thing is the way people think about viral marketing. A 20th century marketing man or woman thinks “how can I use viral marketing to sell more stuff?” . A 21st century man or woman gets a very different answer to what to do because they would ask “how do people interact with viral stuff and how can I help them do that in such a way that I help not hinder them?”
There was a great example on Radio 4 this week. Apparently staff at Somerfields have been piling up toilet rolls and jumping of them for a laugh, publishing the videos on YouTube. There’s aa example of someone walking the warehouse beams at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNnusJT4ntU&mode=related&search=
Dire consequences from 20th century management taking a dim view. Great edgy publicity for 21st century marketers using YouTube to get the message out there. Now this really tests the theory that “all publicity is good publicity” !!
