Monthly Archives: June 2015

June 3, 2015 · 1:01 pm

GenY And Their Managers

If you follow tech at all you’re probably aware that Mary Meeker‘s annual report on the state of digital came out a couple of weeks ago.  It’s always a great read and gives excellent thinking on where we’re all heading on the technology front.  As an aside, by now I hope we all recognize that no matter what business we’re in, what’s happening with the internet and with technology will affect us, so this is probably worth a few minutes of reading.

Buried in the report is a nugget that’s our topic today.  It has to do with what young employees ages 18-34 (often called GenY or Millenials) want out of their jobs vs. what their managers believe those Millennials want.  The differences are startling and I believe have great implications.  Let’s see what you think.

If you have a look at the chart, you’ll see that managers are pretty clueless.  They believe that most younger employees are after big bucks while the truth is that only 27% of actual Millennials report that as an important factor.  Granted, the data is a couple of years old but I doubt things have changed very much.  Where the Millennials say they want “meaningful work” and the importance they place on feeling a “sense of accomplishment,” mangers dismiss those factors as being important almost entirely. Quite the disconnect.

I suspect that this is due to a couple of things.  First, I’ve known many managers who rarely interact with people several layers “beneath” them.  Maybe a “hello” at a holiday party is as close as they get.  One could write that off to the demands of the job and the lack of time in the day.  That’s crap – you need to make an effort and the people who make the actual work happen are worth the effort.

More importantly, I suspect that for many of these disconnected managers this is how they treat their customers as well.  They don’t make an effort to understand the truth about their customers’ needs and wants, believing that they have a full understanding already.  And we wonder why businesses fail…

What your staff wants, how they value work, and how their priorities might differ from yours is something about which you shouldn’t be guessing.  Are you?

 

 

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June 2, 2015 · 10:09 am

Talk To The Hand

Sometimes I feel as if I’m picking on the same companies all the time.  It’s not intentional, I swear.  It’s just that some brands seem to find stupid things to do and push corporate behavior standards to a new low.  With that disclaimer, let us ruminate over the good folks at Spirit Airlines and their latest genius move:

Florida-based Spirit Airlines, the ultra-low-cost carrier, is taking a different tack. Spirit has instead put a robot in control of its Twitter operation to automatically respond to questions.

“A big social media team costs money, so we put our feed on autopilot to save you cents on every ticket,” the airline explains on its Twitter site.

You can’t make this up.  What have we learned about marketing over the last ten years or so?  Your list of words might include “conversation”, “listen”, “personalized”, and any number of other terms that are diametrically opposed to a robot.  Tweet something to Spirit’s “customer service” account and you get the same automated message as the last guy:  a link to a website with FAQ‘s and a list of phone numbers.  While I haven’t actually called any of those numbers (since I refuse to set foot on a Spirit flight ever again), one hopes that there is an actual human on the other end.   Which raises the obvious question – if you’re paying for CSR’s for one channel (the phone), why not do so for another, more convenient and widely used channel (social media)?

Here is yet another business decisions that’s selfish.  Spirit thinks it can save money by not paying someone to work on social, and will allegedly pass those savings on.  You believe that?  If so, I have oceanfront property in Arizona for you.  If a track record shows us anything, this is a brand that will find a way to wring every last penny out of its customers (first to charge baggage fees, first to charge carry-on fees, first to charge to print a ticket, first to charge to pick a seat – shall I go on?).  How stupid do they think consumers are?

Put Spirit’s move in this context from today’s Media Post:

Overall, 47% of tweets about the five biggest U.S. carriers (United, American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue) were negative, compared to just 20% positive, Crimson Hexagon found. The total volume of tweets mentioning these airlines has increased 209% since January 2012.

Is that a channel you want to ignore as an airline (or any other brand)?  Is the message “talk to the hand because the ears ain’t listening” really how any brand wants to be perceived?  Robots? I think not.  You?

 

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June 1, 2015 · 11:57 am

All FIFA-ed Up

One of my favorite movies is Casablanca. It came to mind last week as the FIFA scandal unfolded. Soccer fan or not, you’re probably aware of the indictments issued (with more to come) against high-ranking administrators and marketing executives. If you’re not the details are here.

Casablanca? Yes:

That was, in essence, the response by Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, who claims to have had no clue such corruption was going on.  I’ll wait while you stop laughing, but this really is no laughing matter.  We are watching a major sports organization implode and there are billions of dollars involved.  It is a classic PR crisis, and one thing you can’t do in this situation is to go dark and allow others to dictate the conversation.  That is, however, exactly what the brain trust at FIFA is doing:

A quick look into Socialbakers Analytics tells us that that’s not what was going through the minds of FIFA’s PR team: out of the almost 8000 questions posed to them on Twitter in just under last month, they’ve responded to zero.

That’s from the Social Bakers blog.  Into that vacuum you have one of the indicted executives citing a piece in The Onion as supporting his innocence and several of FIFA’s corporate sponsors have expressed dismay while threatening to pull their financial support.  After all, brands sponsor sports in part so they can transfer the goodwill that fans feel for the sport to the brand’s equity.  When that goodwill vanishes, the brand is damaged as well.

What should they be doing?  I’m not a PR expert but I know silence is not an option.  The few messages they’ve put out there have been met with ridicule and the reelection of the man at the head of the organization, who claims he can clean it up, is widely seen as a negative.

“You can’t just ask everybody to behave ethically just like that in the world in which we live,” Blatter said in his opening remarks to the FIFA congress. “We cannot constantly supervise everybody that is in football,” he added. “That is impossible.”

Really?  Most big companies with which I’ve worked do exactly that, and the stench of corruption has been around the beautiful game for as long as I’ve worked in sports.  Staying silent in a crisis is bad.  Making statements that deny culpability (FIFA is trying to argue that all the problems are with other soccer organizations, not FIFA) is worse.  As with Louis in Casablanca, what’s been going on is very obvious and as the old line goes, I’m choosing to believe my lying eyes over FIFA.  You?

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