Customer Crossroads

Pondering GM: were they living in a cone of silence?

Watching the GM saga unfold, the most striking thing is how long it took for changes to be made, in the face of clear data.

I recently came across an old news story about GM -- around 1999 or 2000 was when the analysis was written. It was course material in a marketing management course. The how-not-to-manage-your-marketing-function part of the course.

The article talked about the pressing needs: To rationalize the brands and banners. Rationalize the dealer network. Get a better fix on consumer desires. The same article made reference to these problems having been in place and observed at least a decade before. 

It makes me think how truly impressive it is when a company can make big changes without a huge crisis. It speaks well of a whole culture when this can happen, not just of an executive. Because the example we have of GM is of a whole company that seemed to be living in a cone of silence half the time.

The service experience: GM vs Acura

Let me illustrate just how huge the cone of silence was by telling you about my 1989 Acura Integra.

The Integra was a delightful car, totally fun to drive and the perfect accessory for a young career woman. When I took it in to the dealership, here's what it was like: 

• Everyone was sharply dressed.
• The place was clean, and they served free coffee.
• They had a van that would drop you off if you worked nearby, or drop you at a transit station if you didn't.
• When you picked the car up, it was always freshly washed
• There were little paper things inside so you knew no oil from the mechanics feet got on your carpet or seat
• The whole thing was a pleasure. I actually enjoyed the ritual of it. I felt like I belonged to an exclusive club.

A few years later, I accepted a fabulous position as a regional manager for a bank. The job came with a car, and my market area included Oshawa, home of three GM plants and the head offices of GM Canada. I wore out three cars on that job, all pretty good vehicles, actually. Two Grand Prix and a Grand Am. No problems, just a lot of driving.

But here's the customer experience at a big GM dealer in Oshawa.

• The reception area was so dirty, I didn't sit down
• I actually didn't put my purse or briefcase down either, because the cement floor was pretty awful too
• There was a beat up wooden podium that served as a counter. It looked like it had been repainted about a hundred times.
• The guy serving me was dressed in oily gray coveralls
• I wondered if I was in the right place
• I felt like I had stumbled into some kind of guy's clubhouse
• They didn't wash the car. In fact, I kind of took a good look at the seat before I popped my suited behind down
• I never went back

If you see it once, it's a pattern

OK, it was one dealership. But there's a good saying in the world of sales and service: "if you see it once, it's a pattern." There are no isolated instances. If some bad thing is happening in one place, it's happening in other places.

Did no-one know how the industry was changing? Or did no-one care? Or did they think that it wouldn't really matter? Or did people try to make changes but just give up due to the tremendous inertia in the organization?

Things may have changed a lot at that dealership. But how would I know -- I never went back to check. And that is just the reality of dealing with consumers. Once we write you off, you're gone from our world.

GM seems to have a game plan now. And good luck to them implementing it, because they have a BIG hill to climb.

The evolution of mobile: Waiting for mobile 2.0 to arrive

 

Remember the early days of the www? People shared good sites to "surf to". We still talk about surfing, but it's not some heady "let's sit down after dinner and surf the web" thing. It's now part of our everyday lives.

Early web sites were called brochure-ware. They were digital versions of print brochure content.  There might be lots of it -- many of thousands of pages of it, in fact, on many corporate web sites. But the first people to put rich media content on their sites were lauded as visionaries.

Well, current mobile communication is the same. You have a device that can go on the internet, so you can read the same stuff, but very tiny. It's just so much web-ware for the handheld, the brochure-ware of our era.

We're now getting some interesting standalone applications. We can interact with the web from our mobile, like posting to Twitter. The whole concept is still largely about using the tiny screen in a highly visual way. For example, there aren't many mobile sites that have voice-driven interaction, for example.

And the real power of mobile -- to leverage location context and location technologies like GPS -- that's just starting. So the customer experience should get a lot better soon.

It should be fun. Remember those heady days of the dot-com bubble? Well the mobile bubble is going to reach a much bigger crowd, because it will reach the unwired developing world.

 

Burger King Studio: I loved you, but you don't like Canadians

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I stumbled across Burger King Studio recently. This is BK's project to engage hipster artists in major cities, and have them create designs that can be screen printed on T-shirts. This seemed like a very creative and edge promotion to me.

These seemed like the perfect item to illustrate a number of interesting trends for a client project I am working on. My plan was to order a couple of these shirts, designed by yours truly, and give them away as prizes at a client offsite. Or if they were really cute, wear one and give the other away.

There were three little annoyances in the shopping cart phase.

First -- you could only order one of a design. Second -- even clicking "back" to see if there is some way to order more appears to wipe out the design you spent loving time creating. Turns out you can order more, but you have to create them one at a time.

Third -- only after you put all your information in do they tell you that they don't ship outside the US. But I had a Whopper with cheese only last week. It's pretty much a global company, although clearly a local promotion. 

What really annoyed me was their D'oh. Like I'm the idiot here.

However, it's easy for websites to find out where I am. Hulu, the re-broadcaster of all things television, won't let me watch anything at all. At least they're polite about it.

A few observations:

Avoid indulging in making people feel like idiots. [Unless of course you are a blogger or a journalist, in which case that is part of your job.] If you are building your brand, you can be edgy and still be polite.

I've been a BK customer for years. I actually go out of my way for BK versus McD. I was prepared to wear their brand imagery on my body! [Something I have previously only considered with Vespa.] And now I'm ticked.

Don't make your Twitter feed just another one-way convo

A sure sign that a fad or trend is going mainstream is that how-to conferences start to spring up. I just got a notice of a Twitter conference. Here's the PR blast highlights:

TWTRCON SF 09 INITIAL SPEAKER LINE-UP INCLUDES MC HAMMER, GUY
KAWASAKI, VIRGIN AMERICA’S PORTER GALE, INTUIT’S SETH GREENBERG,
EDELMAN DIGITAL’S STEVE RUBEL AND PAUL SAFFO

Conference Focused on Twitter for Business to Be Held May 31 at
San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko...Technologizer founder and editor Harry
McCracken will provide the official live Twitter feed.

Tonia Ries of Modern Media (a host or sponsor of this event) thinks you can get a head start on your competitors by having a Twitter strategy now:

“Companies are finding they can use Twitter to reach and engage customers, influence opinions and activate markets. Business leaders who develop Twitter strategies now will have a head start in tapping the potential of this powerful new platform.”

Let's do a little deconstruction, shall we?

MC Hammer --> Celebrity Twitter feeds make sense. It's just People and US with a live feed. Hardly a dialogue

Guy Kawasaki --> another personal brand. Makes sense for him, too, to keep his high profile.

Virgin America --> using it to respond to individual questions and highlight deals. Gives people a place to rant or rave. The more effective business approaches to Twitter seem like this to me. Opens a door to accessibility to the corp. that has been pretty closed until now.

My Take:

Yes, Twitter has it's uses. But there will be lots of abuses, too. It's not a magic bullet. And you can hardly call a Q+A function a "Twitter Strategy". Or perhaps I just don't get it.

One of the things Twitter is not, is a way to reach young adults. They are less likely to be on Twitter. The most likely group? 45 to 54 year olds. Next most likely: 25 to 34.  All that texting you see young people doing with their phones? It's much more likely to be some kind of SMS or instant messaging application. They're sure not reading the tweets of their twittering parents.

Resources:

What Mr. Kawasaki has to say about using Twitter: (It triggered a lot of commentary)

Twitter Traffic Explodes, by Sarah Radwanick, at ComScore. Found the link on Guy Kawasaki's Twitter feed, but he didn't post the link. Annie Colbert, one of his ghostwriters did. Except she signs her tweets, so she's not really a ghost unless you don't know what the initials AC at the end of the posts mean. See how complicated this thing already is?

Twitter Older than it Looks, by Alexei Oreskovic at Reuters. Courtesty of the ComScore story.

[edited 5May09 to shorten the PR blast quote]

This just in: how to write RFPs; Twittering banks; curiosity marketing

Brandchannel, a creation of Interbrand, just published a white paper about how to write a good RFP for your agency. Short and to the point with a good list of dos and don'ts.  For my take on the the qualitative research equivalent, check out Painless Insight Planning.

Wells Fargo joins the list of banks now on Twitter. The feed is called Ask_WellsFargo and is staffed by a guy named Joel. Interesting idea -- instead of pushing marketing messages, he's answering questions. This seems a lot more customer centric than most corporate social media efforts. Just making themselves accessible. Wachovia and Bank of America also have Twitter feeds.

I've written about Vialuna's amazing personalized direct marketing campaigns before. And they have done it again. They sent me a cassette tape with this label: www.HaveWeEvolved.com/SusanAbbott. I was looking at this tape, thinking, "How am I going to play this thing?" Which of course was their brilliant point entirely.

Economy watch: what's happening in gardening

Apparently gardening sales are up this year. And some stores are struggling to keep up with the surge in demand. Given my experiences this past weekend, I'm not surprised to see this.

I tried to grow sweetpeas last year, but I got my seeds in way too late to get results. [For the uninitiated, sweet peas are a pea vine that is grown for it's plentiful, delightful, cuttable flowers.]

This year I decided to make an early start with the seeds. You know how some small projects expand and before long they are big projects? Well, I came home with multiple kinds of seeds, Jiffy 7 peat pots, and special propagation trays. Pretty soon my window-sills were covered with sprouting things.

The packet instructions were clear -- start this process 6 weeks before the last frost. But things seem to have advanced really fast, and soon I had a bunch of 4 inch plants in tiny peat pellets flopping out of their seed trays.

Back to the garden centre I go to try to find some inexpensive 3 inch pots. I was really surprised that both Home Depot and Canadian Tire, with their large-ish garden centres, didn't have a product that met my needs. I found myself considering the purchase of about 50 small terra cotta pots at 75 cents each. This seemed like ridiculous overkill.

I wondered what my grandparents would have done -- surely something clever and thrifty. A brainstorm hit -- which you see in the picture below.

Back to consumers, I can draw a couple of lessons from all this.

[1] Gardening is a very popular hobby. Something like 1/3 of American households had a garden last year, and more plan to start this year. According to the story in MarketingDaily, the number of households with gardening intentions is up 19% from last year.

It's popular for a number of reasons. It's relaxing. It's social and community centred. You can get really great produce for low cost, knowing exactly what fertilizers and pesticides were used. It gives you an excuse to muck around outside when the weather is nice. You experience the joy of creation. All of these benefits and more enter into it.

[2] The recession is a motivating factor for people. Those who already garden are thinking about expanding their efforts this year. And new people are thinking of trying it out. It's not like they are going to be away in Europe for two weeks this year, right? So maybe grow tomatoes instead.

[3] There are many substitutes for any product. They might not even be in your category. My coffee-cup substitute cost a whopping $1.99 for a bag of 51 cups.

[4] Emotional benefits can come from many places. Not only did I save money, I didn't have to keep driving around in hope of finding something to meet my needs. And I came home feeling too clever by half. Bargain-hunting is a highly emotionally rewarding activity.

Resources

Sales Down? Not in the Gardening Aisle, by Sarah Mahoney, Marketing Daily, March 30, 2009.

How to grow sweet peas