Category Archives: Huh?

July 17, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Responsibly Irresponsible

This Foodie Friday, I want to rant a bit on responsibility.  What’s prompting this is a report from the Center For Science in the Public Interest on their annual awards for the 9 most unhealthy chain restaurant meals.  I’ll admit that almost everything on the list sounded pretty good to me.  After all, who doesn’t enjoy 7 cheeseburgers piled high on a bun?  But my rant isn’t about chain restaurants offering dishes that are really unhealthy.  We allow people to sell cigarettes and lots of other products that can potentially kill the consumer (cars, for example).  Is it inherently irresponsible for businesses to create products that end up causing societal problems?  You tell me.  Diabetes is an epidemic but nearly every supermarket product has some form of added sugar and we’re just getting around to banning trans fats which bring about heart disease.  I’d rather than any business person think about minimizing the damage before they offer something to the public but that’s probably wishful thinking.

Here is the thing: you’d have to be pretty stupid not to understand that you’re consuming a lot of calories and fat when you chow down with that 7 cheeseburger menu item.  You probably don’t understand, however, that the 1,330 calories in the burger are accompanied with 47 grams of saturated fat and 4,570 mg of sodium.  Let me quote the report on another dish which comes from The Cheesecake Factory:

The Louisiana Chicken Pasta, which weighs an impressive 1½ pounds, comes topped with four slices of heavily breaded chicken (in case you didn’t get enough white flour in the mound of pasta). Add the New Orleans sauce (butter and heavy cream), and your plate is up to 2,370 calories (more than a day’s worth), plus 80 grams of saturated fat (a four-day supply) and 2,370 milligrams of sodium (1½ days’ worth). For those numbers, you could have had two Fettuccine Alfredos plus two breadsticks at Olive Garden.

When you jump out of an airplane, you know it’s risky.  When you get on a roller coaster, there are always signs explaining the risks.  When you order many of the extremely unhealthy products available in restaurants, you’re generally flying blind. Even when the nutritional information is posted, it’s often inconspicuously posted on a wall someplace and it’s rarely on the menu near the copy that is pushing the product.

So back to responsibility.  We all need to pay more attention to what we’re eating and we need to learn to ask questions about just how bad a dish is.  At least that way we can attempt to minimize the damage by eating a bit better over the next couple of days.  Marketers need to provide enough information to allow us to make intelligent choices.  Killing your customers is almost always a bad idea, and encouraging them to kill themselves (slowly) without speaking up about the risks is, I think, irresponsible.  At least someplace like the Heart Attack Grill is pretty upfront about the risks.  You might not like it, but it’s responsible.

Thoughts?

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June 24, 2015 · 9:33 am

What Are We Buying?

There was a piece this morning about how Samsung appears to be blocking Windows updates on its laptops. The folks over at The Next Web are reporting on a security researcher’s findings during his investigation of Samsung’s softwareupdater. That updater installs another app:

Automatic Updates 'Restart Required' in Window...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The app, conspicuously named Disable_Windowsupdate.exe, is installed automatically without the owner’s knowledge. According to a support representative, it’s there to stop the computer from automatically downloading drivers from Windows Update that could be incompatible with the system or cause features to break.

Unfortunately for Samsung it also appears to change the user’s update settings and disables Windows Update entirely. Once installed, the app even disables Windows Update after the user re-enables it.

As anyone who has ever owned a Windows computer knows, no updates means security risks and other issues.  Which raises a question – who owns the device?  When you buy a house, you’re free to make whatever changes you want – paint it, knock down a wall, or add on.  When you rent, your options are far fewer in number and you might not be allowed to make any structural changes at all.  In my mind, Samsung is behaving like a landlord – you’re a tenant, don’t change our building’s structure.

They’re not alone in this.  Think about your iPhone – your ability to make changes to the device are pretty limited.  Even Andriod phones carry bloatware from manufacturers and carriers that can’t be removed unless you void your warranty and gain root access.  As Wired reported –John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”

I’m sure you have other examples, but it raises the question of who owns what we buy?  At what point does the notion of ownership become outdated?  You might not realize it but you may not own your music, your electronic books, or even your car from a legal perspective.  So what are we buying?

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June 22, 2015 · 10:56 am

Socially Devoted To You

The folks at Socialbakers do a quarterly study on how well companies respond to consumers via social media.  Here is how they put it:

Socially Devoted brands understand the shifting paradigm of customer care. They know that the most responsive and dynamic audiences are on social and those people want responses to their questions and issues.

If your brand responds to at least 65% of audience questions on Facebook and/or Twitter, you qualify as Socially Devoted. The benefits of Social Devotion are clear – Socially Devoted brands get 3.5 times more Interactions than their less-responsive counterparts.

Needless to say, some brands are really good at this but many are not.  Sadly, US companies ranked near last globally in responding to customer inquiries on social.  What I found surprising was that it wasn’t the business sectors or brands – airlines and telecommunications to name names – that were at the bottom of the responsiveness heap.  Actually, they ranked near the top.  Instead, e-commerce – the last sector one would think would ignore the social space – was down towards the bottom.

What do they mean when they say the US ranked near last?

The US ranked 33rd out of the 37 countries, with US brands responding to only 18% of customer questions. Compare this to the average global Question Response Rate (QRR) of 30%…Of course, some US brands are providing great customer care on Twitter. A couple of examples are T-Mobile, whose @TMobileHelp handle received nearly 11,000 questions and responded to 75% of them, and Nike’s local branches (@NikeSF, @NikeBoston, @NikeSeattle, etc.), which maintained QRRs anywhere between 76% and 84%. But many major companies, like Domino’s Pizza (@Dominos) and Walmart (@Walmart), had low QRRs on Twitter: only 13%, and 18% respectively.

The US ranked 23rd out of the 24 countries — beating only India in our rankings. US brands had a response rate of 59%, compared to the average of 74% for all brands globally. US brands on Facebook with poor customer care included Nationwide Insurance, Wendy’s, and Samsung Mobile USA with response rates of 7%, 20%, and 18% respectively. Brands on Facebook with great customer care included many telecom companies — like Sprint with a QRR of 84% , T-Mobile (87%), AT&T (68%), and Verizon Wireless (72%).

You can see if your company has been included in their rankings here.  It might be easy to blame the poor response rate on short staff but clearly when one company can handle 8,000+ questions in 90 days (meaning they answer 91 out of 122 questions every day), it’s not an impossible task.  So why isn’t every company doing that?  My guess is that it’s a matter of priorities and customer-centric thinking.  Maybe it’s also that they still see social channels as megaphones and not telephones.  What’s yours?

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