Brand Rx for Professional Services

Some things you don't want to see at the doctor's office:

• An old, rusty exam table
• A scary plastic apron hanging on the back of the door
• A random cart left in the exam room with an old machine on it that looks like something they punished Randall McMurphy with in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Your doctor using his Palm Pilot to assist in your diagnosis

To be fair, I encountered the items on the above list at two different doctors' offices recently. The kicker? Both are competent, smart physicians but they left around a bunch of warning signals that scared the bejezus out of me as a consumer. (Yikes! A PDA?!? I came to you because I couldn't diagnose myself on the internet.)

The good news? All of these are simple things to correct because they are the kind of branding issues that the business world deals with every day. You wouldn't want folding chairs in your waiting room, right? Make sure you check for potholes throughout your customer experience - especially if you provide a professional service and even more so if you're in a mainstay industry that you think doesn't require marketing (like medicine).

Case in point - I went and got my haircut at a new place a couple of weeks ago. After we were done, the stylist said, "We offer free touch-ups to all of our clients every two weeks so you should definitely stop back and take advantage of it. AND it's free." How crazy-fun is that? You bet I'm gonna come back in for a free touch up (I had to ask for a definition - it's sides and back - basically, everything below the top of your head - between 4-5 week haircuts). And the chances are pretty good too that I'll fall for setting a follow-up appointment (the non-free kind) after my touch-up.

Branding isn't just for soda and sports cars anymore. And there are other ways of building great brands beyond taking out Super Bowl Ads with a huge budget. Actually, the book I'm reading defined it best by saying a brand is "shorthand for a complex set of commercial attributes, emotions, and stories." And there are lots of ways to tell stories about you and your business. Try adding a bit of extra care or zaniness into the experience of doing business with you. It can come in the form of a garbage man who always walks the cans back up to the house or a doctor who paints his exam rooms an interesting color and has free Wi-Fi.

No Reason Not to Do It

20 degrees out and I'm getting gas at 6:40 AM before a business trip. I'm freezing as I gas up my car. I go through the motions at the pump and - as always - I trip over the car wash question. You know what I'm talking about - the mid-purchase 'Car Wash Yes/No' prompt.

Now in warmer weather, I like the option. It's nice to be asked. Give the car a quick wash. It's a fun impulse buy that makes you feel good about yourself. But when it's butt cold and you're trying to gas and get back in the car ASAP this prompt becomes the source of much aggravation. I'm by no means any kind of technical genius but it seems that it wouldn't be hard to throw in a quick customer-centric feature of a thermometer in each pump. Not rocket science, right? Then the thing only asks you if you want a car wash if it's 45 degrees or warmer.

There's two schools of thought on this. If you go by the numbers, there's no reason to have this. There's no direct contribution that it's making to the bottom line. It's an added expense. Thus there's no reason to do it. Or there's the other way to look at it. This is a great little customer centric feature that adds to your customer's experience. It's a nice little comfort that comes with doing business with you and, over time, adds to customer retention and brand loyalty. There's no reason not to do it. Which person are you ...?

Move Over Oprah

I loves me a good book list! Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer takes a stab at one for business leaders in '07. I can personally speak for several of them while others are on my hit list. (You hear that Team of Rivals? I'm comin' for you!) As you can see, I've also added my own list - The Marketer's Bookshelf - to the bottom of my righthand sidebar here on the WesterBlog.

Food for Thought

An oldie but goodie with a slight addendum in light of the impact of social media.

• A customer who is pleased after doing business with you tells one person
• A customer apathetic to your experience tells no one
• A customer who has a bad customer experience tells approximately nine people OR ...
• ... they blog about it and you experience the online firestorm that Kohls has had after someone's cell phone camera met up with a messy dressing room

Thinking of the Whole Picture

The following message from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was distributed to all team members on November 2, 2006. On the same day, the company warned that sales growth would be slow in the year ahead and that its stock had just plummeted. [To be fair, I lifted this from this month's issue of Fast Company. You can also read the full text here.]

To All Team Members,

I want to announce a couple of significant changes regarding compensation at Whole Foods Market.

First, as you know, we have a salary cap policy which limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. The Board of Directors has voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay, effective immediately ... We are raising the salary cap for one reason only—to make the compensation to our executives more competitive in the marketplace ... Everyone on the Whole Foods Leadership Team (except for me) has been approached multiple times by "headhunters" with job offers to leave Whole Foods and go to work for our competitors. Raising the salary cap to 19 times the average pay has become necessary to help ensure the retention of our key leadership ... This increase to 19 times the average pay remains far, far below what the typical Fortune 500 company pays its executives ... The average CEO received 431 times as much as their average employee received in 2004, while the Whole Foods Market CEO (me) received only 14 times the average employee pay in cash compensation.

Most large companies also pay their executives large amounts of stock options in addition to large salaries and cash bonuses. However, this is not the case at Whole Foods Market. As the chart below indicates, the average large corporation in the United States distributes 75% of their total stock options to only 5 top executives ... At Whole Foods, the exact opposite is true: the top 16 executives have received 7% of all the options granted while the other 93% of the options have been distributed throughout the entire company with all Team Members eligible for a grant after 6,000 hours of service to the company.

The second part of today's announcement has to do with my own compensation ... The tremendous success of Whole Foods Market has provided me with far more money than I ever dreamed I'd have and far more than is necessary for either my financial security or personal happiness ... I am now 53 years old and I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simply for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart. Beginning on January 1, 2007, my salary will be reduced to $1 per year and I will no longer take any other cash compensation ... The intention of the Board of Directors is for Whole Foods Market to donate all the future stock options I would be eligible to receive to our two company foundations.

One other important item to communicate to you is, in light of my decision to forego any future additional cash compensation, our Board of Directors has decided that Whole Foods Market will contribute $100,000 annually to a new Global Team Member Emergency Fund. This money will be distributed to Team Members throughout the company based on need ... The first $100,000 will be deposited on January 1, 2007.

With Much Love,
John Mackey

Hunker Down with the Internets

I say 'hunker down' because the weather's supposed to get ugly here on the prairie this weekend. Anyway, today I found so many treats online that I just had to share.

• A great podcast interview w/Seth Godin. I like that this program calls itself a commentary on 'social media marketing'. I hope that term sticks. I think it fits better than the comparably square moniker 'online media.' Thanks Brand Autopsy for the initial link that pointing me there.
• AdCritic.com has a great site set up that features face2face interviews with contemporary ad creatives like Jeff Goodby, Lee Clow, and Alex Bogusky. Very cool.
• Oh, yeah. And everybody is talking about this post re: the not-so-tidy state of affairs at Kohls. Yikes! Or rather ... Hee-haw! Clean up your act. 'Social media marketing' means if you piss a customer off the world has a pretty fair chance at finding out.
  

Enjoy!

Sprinkles the Wonder Dog

Today I had lunch at Panera. After ringing me up the clerk said, "What can I call out when your order's ready?" What an opportunity! What can you say? How about "Hoochie mamma." Holler out hoochie mamma when my order is up! Or some other bit of nonsense. How fun would that be?

Now I know this was all the accidental result of this guy's phrasing but I've always wondered why they just ask for your name at a lunch counter. Why not ask for something fun like your pet's name? Or your wildest dream? When your soup and sandwich is up they shout out "I wanna be spaceman!" or "Sprinkles the Wonder Dog!" Insane? A little bit. Remarkable? Oh yeah. People wouldn't forget your company's service and the treat it is to do business with you.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about maximizing your touchpoints. In a roundabout way I guess this is just a little reminder to look for all of the pockets in your customer communications where you can sneak in a bit of remarkability. A lot of time it costs nothing and pays off in exceptional brand loyalty.

The Swing Marketing Advertised

If you haven't seen this already, check out this hilarious take from Project Cartoon. Jaded or frighteningly realistic? You be the judge.

This site is also a fun example of letting users under the hood to play around. If you click on the 'Create' link you can modify the 'toon and save it to a unique url that you can give to your friends who in turn will send it to their friends and ... I guess it's also an example of viral marketing. The real kicker? The cartoon's content itself isn't original to the site. It's a pretty prevalent cartoon. What's original here (beyond the funky Simpsons-esque design) is that it's user based and can truly grow like an open source project. The cartoonist is even adding new cells from users to subsequent versions.

Presentation Anticipation

Someone recently pointed out that business schools don't teach courses on how to give a presentation. Well, tomorrow you can get a masterclass. Take a sec and check out Steve Jobs' address to the troops tomorrow at Macworld. Apple will probably have it posted somewhere afterward. And for a bit of fun you can even play bingo along with Steve.

Mike points us to some behind-the-scenes shots of the Macworld expo hall from Wired. Pretty good article too. Arrogant, yes. But you can't beat the simple allure of putting up a curtain. You have to know what's under it.

P.S. Bill went today. Remember last year?

Bulb Addendum

As Tevye would say "On the other hand ..."

Before we go canonizing Wal-Mart, my friend (and frequent supporting player in my blog posts) Larry reminded me that this CF bulb push is a very simple way for Wallyworld to appeal to a market segment that has historically - um, told them where to shove it. People like me, with a bit of a chip on their shoulders about the house that Sam built, are also people who are trying to spread the word about CF bulbs and know that environmentalism desperately needs Wal-Mart's distribution. So take your pick - shrewd business decision (touche, Sam) or concerned business stepping up its social conscience.

Whatever the motivation, the issue just keeps tipping as this bit of news out of Detroit shows us.

CF Bulbs Are Tipping

[Note: This is part of a webwide series of blog posts about compact fluorescent light bulbs. January is the darkest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. To fight off the darkness, bloggers everywhere are invited to create a post with their own riff on why CF bulbs are cheaper, better politically, harder to market or just plain cute. I heard about this project from the remarkable Seth Godin.]

My riff on compact fluorescent bulbs? Yeah, I've replaced all of the standard bulbs in my house with energy-saving CF bulbs. Yeah, I did it after I saw An Inconvenient Truth. Yeah, I tried to spread the good word by giving CF bulbs as stocking-stuffers to friends and family this holiday season. I disclose this up front just to be clear: I am the demographic. I would be labeled as a "tree hugger."

But last week something interesting happened. Wal-Mart announced their commitment to selling more compact fluorescent bulbs. The full disclosure here: I am the last person that would pay Wal-Mart any kind of a compliment (I won't go into it - everyone knows why and most dislike them for the same reasons). But with their "Change a Light. Change the World." campaign they are helping to educate the masses (which they certainly have access to) on the big difference these little bulbs can make. Plus you can't argue with the marketing behind that campaign slogan. Sums it up pretty good.

A great part of the Wal-Mart story is that they are so committed to this that they are moving faster than CF bulb manufacturers like GE and Phillips, who aren't ready for a ramp up of this scale (think if your major distributor proposed that users switch from your cash cow to your niche product that lasts several times longer).

For those who don't know, here's the executive summary. Compact Fluorescent Bulbs ...

• Use at least 2/3 less energy than standard incandescent bulbs to provide the same amount of light, and last up to 10 times longer.
• Save $30 or more in energy costs over each bulb’s lifetime
• Generate 70 percent less heat, so they’re safer to operate and can cut energy costs associated with home cooling.
  

For more info, check out the CF Bulb page on the government's Energy Star site.

My first observation is - damnit it just makes sense! In the unlikely event that everything else turns out to be wrong - what do you have to loose by switching?

Second, if the logic above defies you, then go with them because they're cheaper. If serving the greater good doesn't motivate you, how about your inner-miser? You could save $30 per year, per standard bulb replaced. And the things last up to five years! More on the full disclosure front - my inner miser is as vocal as a my inner environmentalist. So the $$$ did help sway me.

Finally, if none of that (PUN ALERT) flips your switch, it should majorly freak you out that Al Gore and Wal-Mart are on the same side of an issue. What are you waiting for? The four horseman of the apocalypse? All kidding aside, I think it's safe to say that this product - which has been around for nearly 30 years - is finally tipping.

The Point? I think it's pretty clear but ... replace a bulb. Just one. Give it a shot. If you like it, go through and replace the rest. If every American home replaced just one standard light bulb with a CF bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes for a year and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

Did you know ...

... that marketing campaigns can sponsor events? I knew companies could but I got introduced to this concept just now on the Rose Bowl where viewers will be treated to the "Built Ford Tough Postgame Show."

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I mean, I understand where they were coming from - "We need to embed our messaging into the sponsorship, etc" but it doesn't seem like a good fit. First, "Built Ford Tough Postgame Show" does not flow trippingly off the tongue. Second, a slogan/idea/positioning statement/sentence fragment (!?!) is a confusing descriptor for a postgame show. It's like Home Depot sponsoring it and calling it the "You Can Do It. We Can Help Postgame Show."

On the other hand. They're Ford. They've been dropping huge chunks of change on big sponsorships and advertising for years. I think it's safe to assume that most people know who they are. So why not use this opportunity to communicate something about the brand? Good so far but where the Motor City giant veers off track is in it's messaging.

"Built Ford Tough" is more business as usual and in case anyone has been living under a rock, the landscape in the automotive industry has been changing dramatically - especially for the Big 3. One idea would have been to take one of their new models that they are pinning their '07 hopes on and have that sponsor it. Like the "Ford Edge Postgame Show." Or the "Bold Moves: The Ford Postgame Show." That is their current slogan and actually sounds exciting and is relevant to the event.

Just my thoughts. You got any? Oh ... Happy 2007.