Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

June 2, 2015 · 10:09 am

Talk To The Hand

Sometimes I feel as if I’m picking on the same companies all the time.  It’s not intentional, I swear.  It’s just that some brands seem to find stupid things to do and push corporate behavior standards to a new low.  With that disclaimer, let us ruminate over the good folks at Spirit Airlines and their latest genius move:

Florida-based Spirit Airlines, the ultra-low-cost carrier, is taking a different tack. Spirit has instead put a robot in control of its Twitter operation to automatically respond to questions.

“A big social media team costs money, so we put our feed on autopilot to save you cents on every ticket,” the airline explains on its Twitter site.

You can’t make this up.  What have we learned about marketing over the last ten years or so?  Your list of words might include “conversation”, “listen”, “personalized”, and any number of other terms that are diametrically opposed to a robot.  Tweet something to Spirit’s “customer service” account and you get the same automated message as the last guy:  a link to a website with FAQ‘s and a list of phone numbers.  While I haven’t actually called any of those numbers (since I refuse to set foot on a Spirit flight ever again), one hopes that there is an actual human on the other end.   Which raises the obvious question – if you’re paying for CSR’s for one channel (the phone), why not do so for another, more convenient and widely used channel (social media)?

Here is yet another business decisions that’s selfish.  Spirit thinks it can save money by not paying someone to work on social, and will allegedly pass those savings on.  You believe that?  If so, I have oceanfront property in Arizona for you.  If a track record shows us anything, this is a brand that will find a way to wring every last penny out of its customers (first to charge baggage fees, first to charge carry-on fees, first to charge to print a ticket, first to charge to pick a seat – shall I go on?).  How stupid do they think consumers are?

Put Spirit’s move in this context from today’s Media Post:

Overall, 47% of tweets about the five biggest U.S. carriers (United, American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue) were negative, compared to just 20% positive, Crimson Hexagon found. The total volume of tweets mentioning these airlines has increased 209% since January 2012.

Is that a channel you want to ignore as an airline (or any other brand)?  Is the message “talk to the hand because the ears ain’t listening” really how any brand wants to be perceived?  Robots? I think not.  You?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,

June 1, 2015 · 11:57 am

All FIFA-ed Up

One of my favorite movies is Casablanca. It came to mind last week as the FIFA scandal unfolded. Soccer fan or not, you’re probably aware of the indictments issued (with more to come) against high-ranking administrators and marketing executives. If you’re not the details are here.

Casablanca? Yes:

That was, in essence, the response by Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, who claims to have had no clue such corruption was going on.  I’ll wait while you stop laughing, but this really is no laughing matter.  We are watching a major sports organization implode and there are billions of dollars involved.  It is a classic PR crisis, and one thing you can’t do in this situation is to go dark and allow others to dictate the conversation.  That is, however, exactly what the brain trust at FIFA is doing:

A quick look into Socialbakers Analytics tells us that that’s not what was going through the minds of FIFA’s PR team: out of the almost 8000 questions posed to them on Twitter in just under last month, they’ve responded to zero.

That’s from the Social Bakers blog.  Into that vacuum you have one of the indicted executives citing a piece in The Onion as supporting his innocence and several of FIFA’s corporate sponsors have expressed dismay while threatening to pull their financial support.  After all, brands sponsor sports in part so they can transfer the goodwill that fans feel for the sport to the brand’s equity.  When that goodwill vanishes, the brand is damaged as well.

What should they be doing?  I’m not a PR expert but I know silence is not an option.  The few messages they’ve put out there have been met with ridicule and the reelection of the man at the head of the organization, who claims he can clean it up, is widely seen as a negative.

“You can’t just ask everybody to behave ethically just like that in the world in which we live,” Blatter said in his opening remarks to the FIFA congress. “We cannot constantly supervise everybody that is in football,” he added. “That is impossible.”

Really?  Most big companies with which I’ve worked do exactly that, and the stench of corruption has been around the beautiful game for as long as I’ve worked in sports.  Staying silent in a crisis is bad.  Making statements that deny culpability (FIFA is trying to argue that all the problems are with other soccer organizations, not FIFA) is worse.  As with Louis in Casablanca, what’s been going on is very obvious and as the old line goes, I’m choosing to believe my lying eyes over FIFA.  You?

Leave a comment

Filed under Huh?, sports business

Tagged as , , , , , ,

May 22, 2015 · 11:57 am

Pretty Pictures Or Perfect Food?

It’s Foodie Friday and I’m shaking my head today.  No, not at the fact that we’re still walking around the Northeast wearing sweaters entering Memorial Day Weekend but at something I read about a “marketing” effort being made by the folks at Chili’s.  This from the AP:

Chili's Grill & Bar logo

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chili’s says it’s spending about $750,000 a year for an egg wash that gives its burger buns a photogenic glaze. It’s part of an effort by the chain to get you to take pictures of its food and post them online.  In addition to using burger buns with an egg wash…the chain also recently started serving its fries in a stainless steel holder that “looks cool.” And ribs are no longer served in big slabs reminiscent of The Flintstones cartoons, but are cut into sections and stacked.

Hmm.  Why risk bad photos?  How about plastic food that’s perfect in each lobby?  Perhaps a little booth into which you can cart your burger and fries that’s perfectly lit?  Maybe the servers and bartenders need to be more photogenic while we’re at it. Even better – provide digital downloads via your free wi-fi so customers don’t risk getting their phones messy.  What’s that?  You don’t have free wi-fi?

This is not a great use of funds, but it’s also selfish.  This move is about Chili’s and not about their customers.  Chili’s wants to “go viral” with pretty pictures and good-looking food.  I wonder how viral really great food is.  Judging from what I pick up in my news feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, great food gets posts (yes, I have a lot of foodie friends) and while some of the photos are lacking in composition or badly lit, I’d try anything my friends think is worth the calories.

In each of its past two fiscal years, sales at established Chili’s locations rose less than 1 percent.  Maybe better looking isn’t the answer.  I’m willing to bet better tasting, reasonably priced and served efficiently with a smile are ahead of it in line.  You know – that silly customer-focused stuff you’re ignoring in your quest for social traction.

What do you all think?

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, food, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , , ,