Warsaw Walking Yoga with Joni Mitchell
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008A day in Warsaw by myself helps me practice one of the key skills needed to build customer relationships …
(The video is actually only a bit more than six minutes.)
Archive for July, 2008
You touch it, you bought it!
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008I just checked into a beautiful, spacious suite at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. This room is four times the size of any hotel room I would choose for myself; thank you to the folks at Subway, for whom I’m speaking tomorrow, for the nice room.
Before sending me up to my luxurious suite, the very nice front desk clerk, Anna, warned me about the mini-bar refrigerator. “It’s touch-sensitive,” cautioned Anna, “So if you open it and pick anything up to look at it, you’ll be charged for it.”
What if I want to read the label on the Pellegrino to see how many calories are in it? Or closely study the logo on a can of Budweiser?
I arrived in the suite, and got lost for a few minutes finding my way around, marveling at all of the amenities I would not have time to enjoy during my short stay. Remembering Anna’s admonition, I located the refrigerator and looked at the outer door. (No way was I going to open it and risk maxing out my credit card) A sign on the door said that “For Your Convenience” you will be automatically charged if you grab anything.
Wow. The Venetian is offering me all of this comfort in my suite, but I was feeling like I better be careful or they might reach in my wallet while I’m not looking. What else shouldn’t I touch? What other secret charges are lurking in wait for me?
Suddenly, I thought of the hangers in the closet. I went to look. Sure enough, they were the kind that have the extra-small loops, to go over the extra-thin rod, so you won’t steal them. Nobody has closet rods in their homes that can fit these types of hangers. Like a Motel 6, The Venetian wants to make sure I won’t walk off with their clothes hangers.
So, after initially feeling pampered by The Venetian, I now see that they look at our relationship as if I were an adversary. This is where Brand Harmony meets We relationships … a few small dissonant cues reveal that we are not We.
Steve speaks
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008Recently, I interviewed with Erik Hansen of the Tom Peters site as a Cool Friend. The interview was really long, and I know you all have lots of things to do, so I broke it up into byte-size pieces.
There are two interview clips in this divShare box. In the first piece, Erik and I talk about what makes a We relationship. In the second, Erik and I discuss how marketers lose their sense of real-life relationships when they start “targeting” their customers.
If you’d like to hear or read the entire interview, you can find it here.
The Brute Force Myth
Sunday, July 13th, 2008What is the biggest change you need make in your marketing? Embrace new media? Embrace social media? Switch spending from traditional media advertising to other options? Yes, most companies need to do those things, but these changes are secondary to the one really big change you should make, if you haven’t made it already.
The biggest change you need to make in your marketing is to abandon the mindset of “brute force” that has ruled marketing since the mid-20th century. Brute force is the belief that the key to winning customers is to interrupt them as frequently as possible with messages that are as powerful as possible. The brute force philosophy implies that customers are easily swayed, and they are eagerly waiting to receive your communications after which, lemming-like, they will change their behavior.
Listen in on most marketing planning meetings, and you will hear the religion of brute force being preached. “We need a more powerful message to cut through the clutter,” or “we’ll need to increase spending to reach our audience more effectively.” Sales people, also, have been sucked into the brute force vortex. They can be regularly be overheard talking about “getting at bats with a customer” or “giving a pitch.”
Guess what? The days of brute force are waning. The main reason: Customers are not as impressionable as they used to be. They don’t buy your product just because you interrupted them more effectively than another company. The second reason brute force doesn’t work well anymore: Unless you work for Annheuser-Busch or McDonald’s, you don’t have a big enough budget to shout louder than everyone else who is also shouting at your customers.
As Tom Peters once said, “Learning is easy, but unlearning is difficult.” Do your best to unlearn what you’ve been taught about brute force as a marketing strategy. Focus, instead, on what really works: Creating a powerful sense of brand harmony for your customers that helps them hear a clear, compelling story as they interact with your company. Brute force falls on deaf ears, but brand harmony is the first step to creating motivating brand impressions in the minds of your customers.
