Monthly Archives: August 2018

August 31, 2018 · 11:35 am

Red Delicious

This Foodie Friday, let’s consider the Red Delicious apple. Until very recently, it has been the dominant apple in orchards all around this great nation of ours. According to the US Apple Association (as quoted in the NY Times), it has recently lost its dominant position to the Gala, and Granny Smiths are closing fast. You can probably hear Honeycrisps off in the distance too.

I know what you’re wondering: is this some sort of tangent brought on the by the start of football season (Go Blue!) and, therefore, the fall apple season? Not really, because there is a business lesson in the fall of the Red Delicious that can be used by any of us.

Have you ever eaten a Red Delicious apple? If you’re not sure, buy one the next time you’re at the market. They will be easy to spot. They’re very pretty – your prototypical apple. It’s a lovely deep red and their skins are generally unmarked. If you were trying to find an apple to use in an art class, the Red Delicious would top your list. So what’s the problem?

Bite into one. What do you get? Not much. They are bland and almost flavorless. That skin is so beautiful because it’s too thick to bruise. Oh sure – you get a blast of sweetness but there really isn’t much of a flavor there, especially when you compare it to pretty much any other apple. While people do eat with their eyes, at some point what they’re eating gets to their mouth and the food needs to deliver on the promise made by how it looks. That’s true of any product or service. Nice packaging, wonderful design, or a fancy sales brochure may attract a large consumer base but if what’s delivered doesn’t fulfill the promise made, it will be one and done. Either you’re solving the customer’s problem and providing superior value or you’re not, and it doesn’t matter how pretty you are.

Don’t be the Red Delicious of your business sector. It may be nice to be number one (and it’s probably pretty profitable for a while), but over time, it’s unsustainable if all you are is pretty. Substance matters, don’t you think?

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August 29, 2018 · 2:25 pm

Happy Faces

According to a piece published by the BBC, scientists have found that goats are drawn to humans with happy facial expressions. There was a study done in which researchers showed goats pairs of photos of the same person, one of them featuring an angry expression, and the other a happy one. The goats overwhelmingly went to the picture of the happy face. They also spent more time examining the happy face photo (we social scientists might call that better engagement!).

Notwithstanding whatever application this has to working with goats, all I can say is DUH! Who among us walks into a bar and heads for the person with a scowl on their face when there are smiling people about? My grandmother would call them farbissinas – sour pusses – and it was about the worst thing she ever called anyone.

Happy people are better businesspeople. Happy people tend to be honest, they tend to be nice, they tend to cooperate, and I think they have more emotional intelligence. All of those things make for better team members. They play well in the sandbox with the other kids, which is one of the most important things I used to look for when hiring.

You can’t be happy if you hold on to grudges. By doing that you’re focusing on the past rather than on today. It’s hard to be happy if you worry about every little thing (sweating the small stuff) when you should be focusing on the things that matter and that you can control. There is nothing wrong with being detail-oriented (in fact, it’s a great trait!) but the details should pertain to those big things. Optimists are generally happy, even in the face of bad things happening. People who attack the problems that arise as challenges and not as…well…problems tend to be happy too.

All of those characteristics make up the kind of folks we should want on our teams. Maybe I’m more of an old goat, but I gravitate to happy people. You?

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August 27, 2018 · 9:55 am

The Sense Of Being Valued

I was reading an article about an emerging form of advertising the other day. It’s a form in which people who view ads are paid for having done so. You can read the article about it here but one thing in the article got me thinking and I hope it has the same effect on you.

The CEO of the company that’s doing this – AdWallet – was asked if this was just “slackers” trying to put a few extra bucks in their pockets. What he had to say was this:

They’re not Millennial slackers looking to earn money on the side, he says. Instead, the average AdWallet user is 45 years or older and earns more than $100,000 a year. The main reason they have been using the platform, he says, is not the money, but the sense of being valued (emphasis added).

That’s something that often gets lost in the marketing process, especially when expressing value to our customers takes a backseat to making more money off of them. For example, many companies are using chat-bots for customer service. Nothing infuriates me more than when I have a problem and, after having tried to solve the problem myself, I call customer service only to reach a phone tree. Reaching a bot instead of a human using many companies’ “live chat” help feature is just as bad. The message I get is “we value profits more than we value you.”

It’s almost as bad as when I get a human and they have no insight at all as to who I am. I give them account information or order numbers and they have no record of past transactions or the fact that I might have called in the past with an issue. I had this experience recently with one of the large ticketing companies. I was supposed to get a CD with at ticket purchase and the code they sent didn’t work. I spent 20 minutes reaching a human who promised me to get back to me with an answer. It’s been two months: No CD and no explanation. Message received: “we are so damn big that we don’t have to care.”

I’ve had similar issues with financial service companies (almost an oxymoron there since their “service” is non-existent) and many others, as I’m sure you have. Yes, I sometimes express my frustration via social media and here on the screed. More often than not I do whatever I can do to avoid interacting with this company again, taking my business elsewhere is at all possible.

When I was running an online commerce store I used to remind our customer service types that I didn’t expect them to solve every problem that arose. What I did expect, however, is that every single customer knew that we valued them, were listening. and would do whatever we could to rectify the issue even if it meant we’d sacrifice some margin by expending time and resources to do so. It’s always easier to retain and up-sell an existing customer than to find a new customer. You do that by letting them know how much you value them on a regular basis. What was the last time you did that?

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