Tag Archives: business

September 23, 2013 · 10:11 am

Crazy

I like crazy.  Not in the clinical sense since that’s kind of disturbing once you’ve seen it.  I like crazy in a couple of the other senses of the word and I think craziness is actually a desirable characteristic in most businesses.  You might think I’m encouraging strange behavior and wild rants.  I’m not, unless “strange behavior” encompasses pushing back against the status quo.

The Jetson family (clockwise from upper left) ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, I think our goal in business is to get our customers to be “crazy” about our brands.  That might sound easy but if so, why don’t we see more brands with fan bases as engaged and passionate as that of, say, Apple?  The newest iPhones went on sale to so-so reviews and yet there are lines to buy them.  Apple fans are so crazy for the brand that competitors make commercials about it.   That’s the kind of crazy we want.

Second, most of us are very afraid of the crazy idea.  We use crazy as a pejorative.  That’s…crazy!  All great ideas began as someone’s crazy concept.  Put a human on the moon.  Humans flying.  Driverless cars.  When I was  kid watching the Jetsons, that was all just someone’s crazy imagination.  Today, it’s reality for the most part.  What slows us down as businesses is resistance to the crazy idea, not the idea itself.  Look at the what the music business went through as digital emerged.  Had they embraced the crazy idea of separating songs from albums and distributing the product digitally they would have prevented years of piracy, the need to sue their customers (now THAT’S crazy), and lost revenues.

Finally, there are the offshoots of crazy – crazy like a fox – or crazy as a word to add positive emphasis – crazy smart.  Personally, I’m a fan of what others might call “crazy talk” – what Steve Jobs was referring to when he talked about those who push the human race forward.   “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

So call me crazy, but I’m with him.  You?

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September 18, 2013 · 10:30 am

Where’s The Wow?

Who remembers Clara Peller? She’s the “where’s the beef” lady from the Wendy’s commercials.

The picture sleeve of a "Where's the beef...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think of her from time to time – well, maybe not of her but of the question she asks. I think of it a little differently, however, as you can probably tell from the title of today’s screed. Let me explain.

20 years ago, Tom Peters started his book “The Pursuit of Wow” with ”Being average has never had much appeal.”  If anything, I think that’s more true today given the explosion in choices customers have.  In addition, businesses have much less control over the information consumers receive about their brand, and word of mouth, according to a recent study by Nielsen, carries more weight than the company’s information anyway. I think it’s just as much about “wow” than it is about “what.”  The latter is the questions potential customers ask about your brand, your product, and your customer service.  The former is what gets them coming back and telling their friends (earned media as it’s fashionably called these days…).

So what is wow?  To me it’s understanding and setting customer expectations before they get there and exceeding them on a consistent basis.  You do this via data and through monitoring the various media channels, especially social.  Brands that are proactive in reaching out to unhappy customers via social channels and fixing the problem post-haste is one example.  Encouraging happy customers to post accurate reviews is another way (they shouldn’t over-promise on your behalf – that’s not helpful!).  Your challenge is to deliver beyond those expectations on a consistent basis.

When you promise to get a repair person someplace, they need to be there on time.  When you promise to deliver a product – say high-speed internet – it’s not good enough for the product to be fast – it needs to exceed the level of speed you promised.  I was promised some coupons from a brand that did a great job of proactively reaching out after a negative tweet from me.  That was a month ago, I don’t have anything, and now the positive experience is turning negative again – the “wow” is gone.

Wow doesn’t need to be overwhelming.  A great sunset is a wow, as is a quiet afternoon.  They’re subtile but they stand out because they exceed our expectations developed over the many other similar experiences we’ve had (a smoggy, cloudy evening sunset or an afternoon filled with the daily noise that makes us all a little nuts).  By stepping back and asking ourselves “where’s the wow” we become better businesses.  Agreed?

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September 17, 2013 · 10:13 am

Our Own Private Idahos

Happy TunesDay!  For our musical subject today, let’s listen to the B52’s.  It’s OK to get up and dance – I’ll wait:

I got to thinking about that phrase and our own private Idaho‘s the other day.  On one level it’s about someone who is wrapped up in their own narrow frame of reference.  They create their own little world and exclude anything outside of its borders.  Maybe that thinking was what inspired yesterday’s post on TV and social.  I do know that it was a bit of synchronicity (not the song!) when I came across an article in the NY Times magazine about popularity that made the point about the continuing segmentation of culture very well.

The piece, entitled What It Means to Be Popular (When Everything Is Popular) sums it up well:

This refraction of the culture into ever-smaller slivers leaves us instinctively with a sense of something lost. Once we listened to the same song together, watched the same show together, argued over the same movies together. Now we’re each focused on our own screen, listening to our own playlist, we’re bowling alone, etc. A landscape that once featured a few unavoidable monoliths of popularity is now dotted with a multitude of lesser monuments, too many to keep track of, let alone celebrate.

I think this creates opportunities for those of us in business along with the obvious difficulties, the ability to scale being the largest problem.   Perhaps we need to be thinking about deep engagement in a series of micro-audiences as opposed to the mass reach everyone seems to desire?  Rather than thinking about going viral (which to me is top-down thinking), maybe we should recognize that there are too many different Idaho’s for that to occur with any regularity and focus instead in creating something for several of them which each of them can serve within their own borders (bottom-up).

When I was a kid there were three television networks and the roster of programs was pretty limited.  The lowest rated shows then would be huge hits now.  That’s not a function of their quality, it’s just that there weren’t any other choices.  Today’s choices are unlimited. “Popular” means someone – anyone – is paying attention.  We need to run our businesses around that definition of popular and build a business model that works, throwing away “old” models in the process.

You with me?

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