August 16, 2012 · 11:05 am

Trust

Johnny Carson turned around his TV career with a show called Who Do You Trust.

Johnny Carson

Ultimately, I think marketers can do the same for their many of their campaigns by asking exactly the same question as if they were their consumer targets.  Whom do they trust?  The answer is “not you” until you’ve earned it, and the places and ways to do that are, increasingly, via social media of some sort.  After all, eMarketer “forecasts that Facebook will have nearly 826 million users around the world this year, up from 650.7 million in 2011.”   Furthermore, a survey of US adults conducted by About.com found that 84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources. The study found that there were 10 primary trust “elements,” or cues, that brands must establish in order to engender trust, including accuracy, expertise and transparency.  eMarketer again:

In a social media context, customers wanted to see that brands had a significant number of positive reviews, and that they didn’t go out of their way to hide the negative ones. The survey found that 41% of respondents said the ability to see reviews on social networks added to their feeling of trust in a brand. Reviews played a bigger role in cultivating trust than seeing that friends had “liked” or recommended a brand, or that the brand had accumulated a large tally of “likes.”

Friends trust their friends or friends of friends or entities that are human, particularly when they’re in review mode.  Corporeal things, not corporate things, if you will, until those corporate things have a human face. Earlier this week I’ve written about how brands need to stop behaving like brands as well as how a cup of soup had a ton of marketing value while some marketing expenses fell flat.  While I hadn’t really planned out a theme week here on the screed, maybe a reminder each day that we need to speak to our audience transparently, honestly, and in a human voice isn’t a bad thing.  What do you think?

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August 15, 2012 · 9:43 am

The ROI On A Cup Of Soup

According to what I can find in their public reporting,

Panera Bread

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Panera Bread spent somewhere north of $33 million on marketing last year.  Their financial results are impressive and they get good ROI on that investment.  I’m willing to bet, however, that the best marketing return they’re going to get this year is on a cup of clam chowder and a box of cookies. You might have heard about this story, but if you haven’t, this AdWeek article sums it up nicely.  A dying grandmother wants some Panera Clam Chowder on a day when the local store doesn’t make it.  A grandson calls to ask them to help.  A smart, responsive, caring manager immediately says yes and when the kid shows up to get it, gives him a box of cookies for grandma to go along with the soup.

It being the age of social, the grandson shares the story on his Facebook page.  Half a million “likes” and 22,000 comments later, that cup of clam chowder bought Panera more goodwill and positive marketing than most of the cash it spent.  Let’s think about what went right and why.

  • Someone answered the phone.  Sounds like a small thing but how many companies do these days?
  • Someone made a decision.  Not “I’m not authorized to do that” or “I need to ask corporate”.  Someone decided to do the right thing and was empowered to make the decision stick.
  • Someone went beyond what they were asked – cookies too!
  • A brand behaved like a person!  The kid didn’t call Sue, the manager.  He called Panera which Sue represented.  The wholly human way in which she responded was perfect.
  • Panera didn’t tell the story – the kid did.  Panera didn’t manufacture anything (except the chowder and cookies).  This resonates because it’s real.

The best marketing these days tends to be just like this – treating your customers well and letting them tell the story for you.  Yelp, Trip Advisor, and other review sites are all about this, and their comments often get ported to other social sites (the usual suspects).  More time on service training and less on trying to create viral media might just get you to the same destination.

Did you see the story?  What do you think?

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August 14, 2012 · 8:43 am

Do Less, Be More Productive

Every manager I know – heck, every business I know – is having to do more with less.

English: Productivity comparison for the membe...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer resources.  Fewer people.  Hopefully not fewer consultants!  That means that every person on staff needs to be more productive.  Productivity is one of those tricky numbers – it’s a ratio of output to input – that seems more attuned to an industrial age than to a time when the world is moving to an information-based economy.  Still, one thing I speak with clients about all the time are results – key performance indicators, things we can measure to gauge our progress.  Sometimes I even get paid based on those productivity measures so I’m very focused on improving them.

One thing I’ve found is that we sometimes confuse putting out more with making more value.  I think many of the technological innovations which we enjoy these days were originally designed to help improve our ability to be productive.  In fact in many ways I think they had the opposite effect.  We’ve become tools of our tools.  For example many years ago when I began in business I was very careful about how I wrote each and every document because someone would have to type that document and if we needed to make changes we had to retype the entire thing.  Once word processing became the norm it was very easy to make revisions. In theory we could put out the document more rapidly since changing a word didn’t mean retyping everything.  The reality is that we spent a lot more time focusing on formatting – how the document appeared – and making little changes – a word here and there – because we could.  We didn’t think through what we were saying before we started to write.  I’m not sure we became all that more productive.

Email is another tool that should make us productive but has the opposite effect in many cases.  It’s easy to add recipients to a chain and everyone seems to want to weigh in.  What could be a 5 minute hallway conversation turns into an 8 hour chain of notes.  We’re less productive.

I advocate doing less to be more productive.  Send less email (but have more face to face conversations).  Don’t respond to every note unless it’s directed to you.  Don’t multitask – finish one thing before starting another.  Trust your staff and delegate.  Spend more time on the 20% that produces real value and less time on the other 80%. Maybe even pretend that a lot of the “productivity tools” don’t exist. What are your productivity secrets?

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