Monthly Archives: August 2016

August 8, 2016 · 11:36 am

Bad Headline, Good Reminder

I missed the end of the Sprint Cup race yesterday. Not a big deal, I thought, you can read the results in the paper or online. I still have some of my old school media habits and reading the paper with breakfast is one of them, so I was little surprised to see the headline you see pictured below. After all, the only NASCAR driver named Hamilton that I know of was Bobby Hamilton, who passed away in 2007. Had F1’s Lewis Hamilton somehow entered the race and how did I not know that? And why was he driving the 11, which has a regular driver?

None of the above. As it turned out the race winner was Denny Hamlin, who competes every week in the 11 car. The headline was completely wrong. This isn’t a website either, so millions of papers aren’t going to be corrected with the press of a button. Putting aside what must be some editor’s massive embarrassment, there is something any of us in business can learn from this.

Newspapers are supposed to be trusted sources of information. While there is no doubt that the public’s trust in media generally as unbiased factual reporting sources has declined, most mainstream outlets still hold themselves to a higher standard. When mistakes happen – and they do daily – most reputable outlets correct them and call attention to the fact that they have done so, recognizing that they erred in the first place. That’s applicable to any business, as is attention to detail. Someone screwed up badly here. Knowing that it’s generally the editors who write (and certainly approve) the headlines, my money is that the fault lies there. Messing up the big things is usually obvious but it’s the lack of attention to the little things that I think irk consumers even more.

This bad headline is a good reminder. Any business loses trust when they mess up. If we’ve done a good job filling up our karmic bank accounts with our customers, we’ll be fine making these withdrawals for mistakes. Do so on a regular basis, however, and that account becomes overdrawn. That’s when our customers move on. Does that headline make sense?

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August 5, 2016 · 10:45 am

The Problem With Talking Eggs

So guess what else falls on this Foodie Friday? My birthday! Naturally, wanting to be prepared for the inevitable rush by friends and family to buy me gifts, I was rummaging around the web for more useless gadgets I could add to my kitchen. I might have found just about the most useless one of all and oddly enough, a business lesson as well.

I think you’ve probably heard of the Internet Of Things. It seems as if almost everything – your fridge, your thermostat, your dishwasher – connects to the Internet. Maybe, however, this thing (thank you, Business Insider) carries it a bit too far:

The Quirky Egg Minder solves a question as old as time itself: “Why can’t I connect my egg tray to the internet?” Made in partnership with GE, this thing syncs with your smartphone and sends you push notifications when you’re on the verge of being eggless. LED lights on the tray itself tell you which of its 14 eggs nearing their expiration date.

I don’t know about you but generally, I don’t need an app to tell me when the egg tray is almost empty. My eyes aren’t quite that bad and I can still see when there are more openings than eggs. In my mind, this is the classic solution in search of a problem. While you know I’m all for solving customers’ problems (that’s the basis for any great product, after all), we can’t create problems to match our solution. It’s actually more rampant than you might think – witness the plethora of new drugs that fix issues we didn’t know we had (and probably don’t!).

I suppose there are some folks who would buy this just to be able to show their friends that their egg supply is sound. I’m not sure that will get you on the subway or a mortgage. I’m also willing to bet that any product that creates a problem in order to solve it is walking on egg shells.

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August 4, 2016 · 10:06 am

Rethinking Brands As People

If you’ve ever spent any time working in marketing you have probably participated in a couple of exercises. One is where you work on “personas” – models of personality. One is for the brand and there are others for various customer segments. It’s an attempt to humanize the brand and to make the customer less of an abstraction. It’s the former exercise that’s our topic today, and there is an element in the brand persona process that some research shows is overlooked.

I’ve sat in meetings where the room tries to figure out our business’ personality traits. What is our attitude? Where do our values lie and what are our strengths and weaknesses? A brand does this to make it easy for customers to relate to and bond with us. That persona is then used to create everything from messaging to packaging to customer service scripts. There are a couple of areas that are common to any brand, or should be according to some research by the folks at Edelman. They released The 2016 EARNED BRAND study, which is a global online survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries that examines the consumer-brand relationship across 18 brand categories.

The study found that brands globally and across many categories were failing to connect. Part of that might be reflective of the things the study measured: how the brand embodies a unique character, builds trust at every touchpoint, and invites sharing, inspires partnership. Generally, most brands come up very short on those traits and that prompted a thought.

Maybe instead of just figuring out what our brand is we ought to spend time trying to really humanize it by behaving in ways that a good friend ought to. Think about your closest friends. The three characteristics enumerated above and among those measured by the survey are probably things you’d say about your close friends. In business, it’s not just about who were are as a brand but how we present ourselves and treat our customers. As brands, if we want to be “people” perhaps we ought to start acting as good people do. Listen more, be memorable, do good things in our communities, and build trust.

Make sense?

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