Tag Archives: business

July 6, 2012 · 8:12 am

Mr. Roboto Comes To Cook

For our Foodie Friday Fun, today’s topic is the delicate balance between being consistent and being boring.  What spurred the thinking on this topic was, in fact, a food-related story that comes to us from The Daily Mail’s website.  It seems that in China they have a number of restaurants operated almost entirely by robots.  The machines do pretty much everything – cook the food, serve the drinks, take the orders, you name it:

If you pay a visit to this restaurant, in downtown Harbin, China, you will find 18 robots – from a waitress to a cooker to an usher – ready to ensure your dining experience is perfect.  The restaurant has 18 types of robots, each gliding out of the kitchen to provide your dish, with specialty robots including a dumpling robot and a noodle robot.

I’ve written before about the need to provide our customers and clients with a consistent, predictable experience yet I find this story repugnant.  I’m sure the food is uniformly something – good?  Bad?  Mediocre?  No, I guess the word soul-less comes to mind.  And that’s the business point today.

Cooking and serving food to another human being is not just another piece of manufacturing.  When I think of robots I think of them building cars, not canapés.  Oh sure, there are automated processes throughout the food industry, but they’re for packaged goods and supermarket foods, not restaurants.   What does this have to do with your business?  Think about how many business transactions involve us talking to a machine (I count email on that list – it’s more machine-like than human, lacking nuance and expression) or machines speaking to one another (digital media buying more often these days, for example).

Our clients want to see the humanity.  I’m willing to bet most clients and customers are willing to sacrifice a bit (and ONLY a bit) of perfection for the human touch.  The smile they get when they’re greeted by name.  The new photo of their kids they get to show off.  Business isn’t just an exchange of something of value for compensation – when it’s done well there are a number of intangibles that no robot can offer.

So ask yourself this.  Are you acting like a robot or like a human?  If it’s the former, maybe you ought to contemplate the differences that make us the latter.  You with me?

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July 3, 2012 · 9:20 am

Surprise!

“Surprise” is a loaded word.

Mega Surprise

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We delight in surprise parties (well, maybe as long as we’re not the one being surprised) and we dislike surprise hairs in our soup (particularly if they’re not our color).  It’s a powerful concept, although I guess the scientists would tell you that it’s not the surprise itself that’s the issue – it’s the emotions that follow the surprise event.

Surprise is a concept of which we need to take full advantage in business while simultaneously avoiding it like the plague.  When a customer can’t find something in the store, we can take joy in their surprise when a store employee digs around in the back until they find an item thought to be out of stock.  This happened to the Mrs. just this past weekend. She’s now a customer for life and has been telling the story to everyone.  Earned media indeed!

On the other hand, when you advertise a product on sale and are out of stock an hour after the store opens, customers feel as if they’ve been lied to – it’s hard for them to believe you haven’t pulled a classic bait and switch to get them to the store.

Managing people often involves surprises of both sorts.  There are little ones like a key person calling in sick and big ones like them resigning.  On the other hand, sometimes we’re surprised by pieces of business those employees find out of the blue or by their achieving a higher standard in their work.  Yay!

I guess what it all means is that we need to manage expectations constantly both to avoid the bad kinds of surprise and to increase the impact of the good kind.  No, we shouldn’t have people thinking that a hair in their soup is permissible – that shows a need to manage something other than expectations – but we can make sure that when we set standards we adhere to them.  Customers and employees notice.  Our job is to surprise them in the good way.  Given how few organizations are able to get to their own professed standards, it shouldn’t be that difficult a task.  You agree?

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July 2, 2012 · 8:19 am

Stock Photography

A picture is worth a whole bunch of words.  We all know the expression and it’s true: it’s often easier to show than to tell.

Flower Stock Photography

Flower Stock Photography (Photo credit: Carlos Lorenzo)

Visuals make presentations (and blog posts) more interesting.  Way back in the days before we all had access to everything (that’s before the Internet for you youngsters), stock photo houses made a pretty good living as photo resources.  When you only needed a generic image to reinforce a point, the photo house was your first stop.

The photo I’ve used could be used to illustrate flowers or spring or gardening.  The point about stock photos is that they are generic products.  They are used multiple times by different people for varying purposes.  They don’t really have any distinctive personality.  Why start the week with this?

More of us seem to be in the business of stock photography than we believe.  What I mean is that we are making products that are stereotypical.  Web sites look the same in terms of layout and functionality.  There’s way too much “me too” and not enough of a focus on what makes us unique or better.

The companies that get it right take what could be something stock and make it their own.  Apple did it with the iPod, which wasn’t the first MP3 player.  Amazon did it with online commerce – they were far from being the first store but they have taken the notion of a store and made it very much their own.

I could go on about this but you get the point.  Sure, generic products made and sold less expensively have their place.  They’re low margin and don’t inspire much loyalty (a low price point is a hard-to-defend place since anyone can lower their price if they want to sell at a loss).  We need to take our own photos and not buy from the endless supply of generic stock.  We need to constantly ask what makes our product or service unique and better.  All of us in business are better off when that happens.

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