Category Archives: Reality checks

July 11, 2018 · 11:34 am

Quit Nagging Me To Death

I’ll state at the outset that I’ve always had a thing about being nagged. It’s probably a mother issue that stems from my tendency to procrastinate or maybe I’m just a rebel at heart. Either way, I don’t like being nagged. You probably have some sensitivity to it yourself.

With that in mind, I’m here to remind all of us that nagging is just as bad as a marketing tactic. Instead of the desired result (a sale), it might lead to the exact opposite (a cancellation, a return, or a vow never to do business with you again). Let me give you an example.

I received yet another email the other day from one of the golf publications to which I’ve subscribed for at least a decade. The email said in big bold letters that

This is your LAST CHANCE to renew your subscription and give a FREE gift.

OMG! I don’t want to miss an issue so I’d better renew right now! Except it’s a lie – my subscription doesn’t expire for well over a year. I went back and looked in my email trash and on average, they send me an email every 3 days urging me to renew. This is on top of the physical mail they send enclosed in an envelope with each month’s magazine as well as the occasional piece of stand-alone snail mail. Enough! Basta! Genug!

Fortunately for them, I enjoy the publication so I’m not going to cancel, but there are a few things any of us can learn from their constant nagging. First, I’ve become numb to whatever they send me. I toss the snail mail and I delete the emails, unopened. I can read the mailing label to see when my subscription really does need renewing. Second, the offer they’re extending really doesn’t benefit me. It’s not a particularly different renewal rate and none of my golfing friends are musing that their lives would be better if only they had a subscription to this magazine. It only benefits the publication – they get a renewal and a new subscriber at a low cost of acquisition. Presumably, they’ll start nagging my friend soon after the first issue arrives.

This publication is far from the only nagger in my life. Amazon’s daily emails, several golf schools, and many others continue to send me nagging messages every day. I do unsubscribe, of course, but new naggers seem to take their place. The messages seem cold and impersonal to me since most of them aren’t personalized beyond the name. I appreciate that people who put things in shopping carts and leave your site might need a little reminder to finish their order or that when you truly have something special going on it’s to the consumer’s benefit to know, but the daily barrage of crap just makes people numb at best or angry at worst.  Deliver value to the consumer. Educate them about your product without nagging them to buy. Explain the benefits in their terms. And don’t nag. After all, nagging is the leading cause of divorce and you can’t have customers divorcing you! What do you think?

1 Comment

Filed under digital media, Huh?, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , ,

June 27, 2018 · 11:12 am

Can We Distinguish Fact From Fiction?

How good are you at distinguishing fact from fiction? As I’ve written before, I think that is one of the two most important things anyone can learn in their professional (and personal) lives, with the ability to express your thinking clearly orally and in writing being the other. The folks over at The Pew Research Center studied whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it. The results aren’t particularly surprising but they also are a good reminder to any of us in business.

First, the results. I’m summarizing here but you really should read the entire study – it’s fascinating and gets to a lot of what’s going on in the country today:

The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion…Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side.

In other words, confirmation bias comes in quite a bit of the time.  I raise this because I think it happens all the time in business as well. We receive data that doesn’t support the direction in which we’re taking the business but we reject it as biased. We get complaints from customers but dismiss them as opinion even when there are facts to support the customer’s unhappiness. It all comes back to what the study measured – many of us can’t distinguish fact from fiction.

We need to pay attention to the source of what we’re hearing. Does the data come from an unbiased, third party or is it an opinion? Is the person who is telling you something doing so based on first-hand experience or are they just repeating something they’ve heard elsewhere? Do multiple sources independently report the same information (not quoting one another, in other words) or are you basing a business decision on a single source? If you’ve spent any time in business, you know that even “trusted” sources – your analytics, your financial reports and others – can be manipulated. Always seek the unvarnished, fact-based truth and learn to ignore opinion unless it’s labeled as such. It’s hard to do that, but you’re up to the task, right?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 6, 2018 · 11:50 am

Facebook, Sears, and Kodak

When I was a lad several decades ago, many Americans did their shopping at Sears and took their pictures with Kodak film (I can explain “film” to you youngsters if need be). More recently, my kids might have shopped at American Apparel or Claire’s. What all of those formerly huge companies have in common is that they are all nearly dead. The reasons for that range from bad management to dumb financial deals to changing tastes to the digital revolution. In every case, however, I think there is a common thread of a failure to understand their customers in the context of the customers’ changing world.

We have something similar going on in my mind with Facebook. It’s huge and seems invulnerable but one might have said the same thing about Kodak or Sears 50 years ago. First, think about how the world is changing for their customers. Privacy has moved from something that digital folk like me were babbling about many years ago to something that is on everyone’s mind. In an April survey of 1,051 US adult internet users by Janrain, most respondents said they are not in favor of websites or apps using what they learn about them online to target ads. In fact, 70% of them want some very restrictive laws, similar to the E.U.’s GDPR, passed here. I don’t think there is any doubt that a tech backlash is going on and the more consumers and lawmakers find out about the sloppy (at best), invasive, and maybe criminal (at worst) data use by large tech companies, the greater that backlash is going to become.

Facebook’s entire business is built around invading your privacy. Two points from eMarketer:

More people are becoming suspicious of sharing data through third parties. In a March 2018 survey from Raymond James, more than eight in 10 US internet users said they were at least somewhat concerned about how their personal data is being used on Facebook. Similarly, in a Gallup survey of 785 Facebook users in April 2018, 43% said they were very concerned about invasion of privacy. That’s an increase of 30% in 2011.

What has resulted is that people, especially young people, are sharing less content. The entire reason Facebook is valuable for most people is that content that their friends, classmates, and family post. It’s the network effect – that value of the network relates to the number of people on that network.

I’m not shorting Facebook stock today but I’m not so sure that unless they get their privacy house in order that won’t be a bad play down the road. Less content means fewer active users which leads to less revenue. Will they all move to Instagram (a Facebook company)? Maybe, but probably not since that’s not what’s occurring now. As each day brings a new headline involving a bad actor and data, another nail gets pounded into the coffins of companies that don’t respect their customers’ privacy and wishes. Privacy and data use are no longer just food for geek chats. They’re on the front page. How long can Facebook or any company last if they don’t figure this out? Longer than Sears or Kodak?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Reality checks

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,