It's the Little Things ...

... that transform good marketing into great marketing. This morning, The Lion in Winter was on and I had to go to the endlessly-useful Internet Movie Database. (BTW - Wasn't this one of the first viral sites that all of your friends told you to bookmark?) Anyhew ... I got into the individual movie page and noticed a dramatically tweaked page layout (the movie poster is on the left hand side now!). As always, it was a little jarring but pretty soon I got the lay of the land. Helping me in this endeavor was the small bar below the top nav shown above. If you can't read it, it simply says 'Questions about our new look? See our Redesign FAQ for answers.'

This link takes you to a comprehensive FAQ that if you take the time to read you can see that this wasn't just a cosmetic redesign. Everything was changed based on research and user feedback and testing. Wow. As if I needed another reason to like this online geek-cylcopedia - now they have to go and run the very model of a user friendly site. And the kicker? The FAQ makes it clear that nothing is permanent yet as they are still testing the redesign. A+ IMDB! (P.S. You'd be surprised how many times you have to remind people to test.)

Throwing the Brand Out with the Bathwater

This week at the Chicago Auto Show, Ford announced that - just months after they retired the model - they would be resurrecting the Taurus/Sable nameplate. This summer when they release new models of the Ford Five Hundred sedan, the Freestyle crossover, and the Mercury Montego, they will be rechristened as the Taurus, Taurus X, and Mercury Sable respectively. I think this is an important step in helping the recovery of this particular Detroit giant. How big of a step it is I'll get into in a bit.

I also had occasion this past week to hear Jack Welch speak before the National Automobile Dealers Association. When first asked what he thought GM and Ford were doing wrong he sighed exhaustively and said "Jesus ..." More impactful, though, was when he took an informal poll of the audience. He started by asserting that he thought Detroit was getting better but they were still in the process of brand recovery so it's still an uphill battle. He then asked the crowd if they thought the current cars were better then peoples' perception of them. A majority of hands went up - mine included.

See these are the issues: perception, brands, story.

The product is on an upturn but they've squandered most of their equity so most of these early-recovery innovations will be spent getting their brands out of the black. So if admitting you have a problem is step #1 and making some immediate course corrections is step #2 the next questions have to be How did this happen and Is what they're doing now enough?

In the case of Ford, I think resurrecting the Taurus is a smart tactic. Who in their right mind thought it would be a great idea to kill the model for middle America - your average apple pie sedan? I think it's safe to say that most people have at least ridden in this classic at one time or another. How many models can you say that about? But I think Ford's using the wrong 'r.' I think they would have been better off reinventing the Taurus rather than slapping the nameplate on a slight redux of the model's less-than-popular successor. It seems everyone - especially Ford - has forgotten the legacy of the Taurus brand.

Before the Cadillac and Nissan design renaissance there was the Taurus. In a sea of boxy, post-seventies aircraft carriers, Ford birthed an automotive design revolution with the original jelly-bean inspired '85 Taurus. It looked like "the car of the future" (this was reinforced with great product placement as the police cars in Robocop - this helped Ford tell the "car-of-the-future" story). And everyone wanted to emulate the design of this innovative vehicle.

What followed was the most dangerous spoil of success - brand stagnation. It's so successful we shouldn't change it at all. And they didn't. Not significantly for the next decade. Even then it was, at best, a slight update with the jelly bean model making way for the late '90s "bubble" Taurus. This changed little also and only for the worst with all of the design funk being squared out and leaving a large, average-looking sedan. Ironically, the car had evolved into the very thing that the original had rebelled against.

So, again, I make the case that what they should be doing is reinventing the brand. It may sound crazy but if I was Ford I would make the new Taurus about reinventing the design of the American sedan again. That's the right way to be a good steward to a powerful brand like the Taurus.

As for Detroit recovery, I put more stock in broad strokes like GM's new electric car the Chevy Volt. This could be a crazy move and it could indeed fail. But as Tom Peters points out "crazy times call for crazy measures" and every now and then you have to blow up what you've worked forever to create and reinvent it in order to ensure your organization's staying power in the years to come.

Do you see the nuance? You have to risk blowing up what you've created but not at the cost of your most valuable asset - your brand. See, it's not enough to do something 'good.' You have to jump in the deep end and either triumph or fail fabulously. But being 'good enough' is clearly no longer good enough. And you need to be a steward to a brand and help it grow and develop. You can't just leave it alone for years thinking that times will keep supporting your product because they always have. A steward helps your brand change with and for the times.

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