Tag Archives: business

January 24, 2014 · 11:53 am

Can You Feel It?

It’s Foodie Friday and today I was inspired by something I saw last night on The Taste.

Healthy Berries are Good Food for Health

(Photo credit: epSos.de)

Yes, I do watch a lot of competitive cooking shows but I find it to be a great way to learn about technique and also how to think about blending flavors, textures, and foods into great dishes.   The guest judge was Roy Choi and he was giving one team a master class on making street food (of which he is a master!).  While serving them the food, he asked the contestants a lot of questions about how what they were eating made them feel.  Not how did it taste – how did it make them feel.

That resonated with me on a number of levels.  Maybe you’ve had the experience of eating something and having had a flood of memories hit you.  I certainly get that when I cook one of my grandmother’s recipes.  I’ve also had it happen sometimes when I eat a dish in one place that I’ve had in another and I am taken back to the place in which I first had it.  Food that makes you feel something is a great goal, one we can apply to our businesses too.

Part of many great brands’ success is that they make you feel something.  It can be nostalgia about our childhoods (Coke, Kraft, Campbell’s Soup) or being a part of a bigger cause (Apple, Prius), or maybe just safe and loved.  That emotional involvement, how we make people feel, is what helps differentiate great brands and great service businesses.  It’s not how the business “tastes” as much as it is how it feels.

Think about “cold” brands.  I’ve been to hotels where the place was clean and the service good but I’d have given up some efficiency for a little warmth.  I don’t think “warm and fuzzy” is for every business but I think every business does need to think about how their customers feel after interacting with them.  Those aren’t the kind of check box answers one gets on most surveys if the questions are even asked.  You need to dig deeper, maybe even become your own customer.  If you can’t feel anything, they probably can’t either, or at least not anything you’d want them to repeat. You with me?

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January 23, 2014 · 11:40 am

Feeling The Love

I read something the other day that got me thinking.

Advertising

(Photo credit: Wrote)

Businesses spend over $200 Billion on advertising and yet surveys show that only 4% of customers trust advertising as a source of information about products and services.  I’ve written about this before and how word of mouth, consumer review sites, and other social media are far more important these days in many purchase decisions than is good old advertising.

Think about your own shopping habits.  You are interested in something, and the bigger the purchase (TV, technology, a car) the more likely you are to research the heck out of it.  Anyone you know bought something major without asking around or checking it out?   Much of the time, that “checking out” process happens in a physical store but many of us window shop online as well.  Maybe it’s advertising that precipitates the desire for a product but it’s what happens next that sells it.

I was in an unfamiliar store the other day and couldn’t find something.  I asked an employee who was replenishing the shelves where I might find the item, fully expecting an “aisle 5” sort of response.  Instead, he put down his box and walked me over to where the item should have been.  When it wasn’t there, he said “wait here” and went in the back to find me what I needed.  I was feeling the love and this store will be a regular part of my shopping.  Yes, it was advertising that got me in but had he just directed me to an aisle I would have left the store empty-handed, unlikely to return.

Maybe “customer love programs” needs to be a budget item.  Many retailers cut back on floor help after the holidays while increasing advertising.  Is that backwards?  Might money spent on customer service – read that as retaining existing customers – have a better ROI than on the ads designed to attract new ones?  A happy customer might not tell everyone about how great your products are unless they’re asked, but I can guarantee a large percentage of them (studies show 95% take action) WILL tell their friends how horrible you are (79% told others) should they be unhappy with you or have a bad experience.

We all have heard the old Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action paradigm, or  AIDA.  Maybe we need to get “show some love” in there somehow.  Thoughts?

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January 22, 2014 · 11:36 am

Benchmarks

There is a scene in the movie “Caddyshack” in which two of the characters are having a chat after golf:

Judge Smails: Ty, what did you shoot today?
Ty Webb: Oh, Judge, I don’t keep score.
Judge Smails: Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?
Ty Webb: By height.

I know – I do manage to find ways to get golf references into the screed a lot.

Charts

(Photo credit: GrapeCity)

However, what you just read is an example of benchmarking – measuring your performance or a business unit’s performance against a standard.  It’s something we all do.  Clients ask if their email open rates are good or if their site’s bounce rate is higher than others I’ve seen.  Most of the time a company tries to identify standards that come out of best practices and benchmark themselves against them.  Sometimes even entire industries (usually through a trade association or some other third-party) will anonymously aggregate the results  across the industry to help the members figure out if their results are on par with the industry as a whole.

We see the benchmarks all the time in financial results.  ARPU in the wireless industry, for example, is a very public benchmark; percent subscriber growth is one in the cable industry.  I find them helpful but am probably not as fixated on them as a lot of other people.  Here is why.

In my consulting experience I’ve found very few businesses that align exactly.  Sure, many of the folks with whom I work face the same general challenges, but asking, for example, if a bounce rate is high if it ignores the purpose of your page or site vs. what others are trying to do. Where I have a bigger issue with benchmarks is when companies use them to judge other companies (or other people!).  Those sorts of comparisons get our eyes off our own goals.  By comparing and judging, we’re implying that every business is on the same journey (or that every person is as well).  We can’t know for sure what those journeys involve.

Benchmarks are like many other business tools.  In the right hands and using the right perspective they can be very useful.  The again, some companies do what Ty did in the example – he’s a tall guy, let’s measure results by height!  Used without context or skewed to a purpose or to pass absolute judgement, they’re dangerous.  That’s my take – what’s yours?

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