Tag Archives: business thinking

December 24, 2013 · 9:45 am

Wrapping It Up

There won’t be a blog post tomorrow – it’s a day for family and friends and not thoughts of business. I know it’s TunesDay but the music today is all my own.  It’s become my annual thing to repeat the most read posts of the year between the two holidays, which means this will be the last original post of the year.  Most read music post next Tuesday; most read Foodie Friday post…well, you can probably figure it out.

English: Gift ideas for men - wrapping paper e...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First and foremost, a healthy and Happy New Year to each and every one of you and to your families. Having had several health issues occur within my extended family over the last year or so I can tell you being healthy trumps anything business can give you.

As I’m writing this my two daughters are in the next room wrapping gifts for everyone.  I’ve been forbidden to leave the room I’m in lest the surprise of gift-giving be jeopardized.  They will be the first to admit that they inherited their father’s inability to wrap gifts.  My futile attempts look as if the package had been wrapped and mailed through a series of post offices across each continent, each of which adds a nick and a tear to the wrap job.   Needless to say, the quality of my gifts needs to be spectacular since the packaging is terrible.  Which of course is the business point.

A walk through most markets show you that most companies spend a lot of time thinking about packaging and nearly all of them fail.  Very few go beyond the conventional.  Have a look at these examples and your mind will be opened up as to what we can do – whether it’s a package or the product itself – when we don’t use where we are as a jumping off point.  Starting from scratch is hard – there are few things more terrifying as a blank whiteboard (or an empty space in which one needs to write a blog post).  Those blank spaces – filled only with promise – are where we need to force ourselves to begin.

The year starts next week and with it everything is new again.  I hope you use it to rethink everything.  Even if you come out if the same place, you’re better off for having done the exercise and placing it all in a nicely wrapped package.  Happy Holidays!

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December 17, 2013 · 10:53 am

What’s That Sound?

For our TunesDay installment this week I want to write about a style of music rather than a particular song.  As with most musical styles, nearly any song can be rendered this way although I’m not completely sure why anyone would want to do so.  That style is what many of you would call “elevator music.”  Don’t confuse that with “easy listening.”  The folks who created the latter meant you to listen.  The former, also known by the main practitioner of the style commercially – Muzak – is meant to create a mood while staying in the background.

In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, the sound of Muzak was used as “stimulus progression” to improve productivity.  The music wasn’t meant to be listened to, just to set a mood.  The increasing pace of the music  was meant to keep workers energized and was popular through the 1960’s.  It was background music – the stuff you heard in elevators: comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  By the mid 1980’s, background music had gone out of fashion.  Besides on-going accusations of “brainwashing”, the fact was that musical tastes has changed.  Music was more a part of people’s lives and the stimulus part of the program died.

The music we hear today in malls, airports, restaurants and, yes, elevators is meant to be in the foreground.  The mood music we hear can often be anything but comforting, unobtrusive, and inoffensive.  It can be hard to ignore.  Maybe that’s what many people just opt out by plugging in to the ubiquitous ear buds and creating their own aural environment.  Which raises the business point.

If you’re trying to move your marketing from being “elevator music” that plays in the background to being front and center, you run the risk of people opting out altogether.  I’m not advocating staying in the background.  There is too much marketing noise, I know, but standing quietly in a corner hoping a potential customer will take pity and bring you a glass of punch won’t work either.  The real challenge is to attract attention the way a skilled teacher does in a noisy class: by continuing to do your thing at a volume that requires people to pay attention and delivering information that people find important when they do so.

Is your marketing going to be Muzak – forgettable background sound that attempts to alter people’s moods –  or is it going to be something people hum to themselves because it’s had an impact?  Which sound is yours?

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December 12, 2013 · 12:07 pm

Stews Leonard’s And The Thumbtack In The Chowder

Today’s tale ended up providing a good business lesson but began as a potentially lethal bit of negligence.

Oyster crackers are better with this than thumbtacks!

Oyster crackers are better with this than thumbtacks!

I went to see my folks the other day and my Mom had something interesting to show me. On her counter was a container of clam chowder from the Stew Leonard’s store down the street from their house.  She had purchased the soup the day before.  On top of the container was a thumbtack as you can see in the photo.  I don’t know about you, but my Dad prefers crackers with his chowder and doesn’t ever consider thumbtacks as a condiment.  However, that is exactly what he found as he ate.

How the tack got in the chowder is a serious problem but not our focus today.  Obviously the commercial kitchen should not have small, sharp, unsterile objects anywhere near food but let’s put that aside and focus on what happened when I returned to the store.   Stew’s is known for great customer service.  At the front of the store here in Norwalk is a big stone that says:

We’ve been going to the Norwalk store for 30+ years and have always found that they practice what they preach.  However, we’ve never had an issue like this.  In any event, I took the tack and the chowder to customer service at the Danbury store and explained the problem.  The young woman didn’t ask for a receipt nor question me in any way.  She just apologized, asked me if I had other shopping to do and to please come back to see her when I had finished.  Upon my return she waved me to the front of the short line, asked for the new clam chowder I had picked up, tagged it as paid and refunded the price in cash.  I gave the soup to my folks along with their refund and they were happy.

We get opportunities in business to take bad experiences and make them worse or to make them better.  This was the latter which I think is a model about handling a customer problem.  Address it immediately, admit blame, tell the customer how you’re going to solve the problem, make restitution, and see if that resolves it.  I suppose if I had carried on about wanting gift cards or something more I might have got it but I wasn’t there to take advantage( I realize some customers are!).  They could have asked me for my parents’ email to send them an apology (about the only improvement I would have made).  They were being adult about it – I thought I’d reciprocate.

Many places would have denied there was a problem (that’s impossible, sir, maybe you dropped it in while you were heating it up).  Many would have demanded a receipt (maybe you were storing someone else’s chowder in one of our containers).  Some would have made me solve the problem (so what do you want me to do about it) instead of offering a solution themselves.  They did none of those things and so what could have been a series of horrible posts on social media are, instead, a blog post that praises them.

How would you have handled it had your customer found the tack?  Any differently?  Could this have been handled any better?

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