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"Ideas are usually rejected out of turn for being too 'something' — too fast, too unproven, too far beyond the corporate image. 'Too something' is a reactionary description used to take the edge off ideas that are strong, bold, and a little scary at first sight. Your challenge is to help people discover a means, harmonious with the culture, to accept your concept."
If you can read Japanese then you can read my book. Order it from amazon.co.jp.
At the GOT SOCIAL MEDIA conference in Houston last week, Kelsey Ruger, from Pop Labs, infused his presentation with elements from The Matrix. Brilliant.
As the above image depicts, companies today can take the Blue Pill and pretend that nothing has changed in the marketplace. Or, companies can take the Red Pill and begin to experience a deeper connection with customers through using Social Media. I hope Kelsey sees how deep the rabbit-hole goes with THE Social Media MATRIX. He is onto something potentially big in helping more people understand why it is important for companies to swallow the Red Pill of Social Media.
For those who missed the GOT SOCIAL MEDIA conference, you can riffle through some of the presentations on SlideShare. (Video of the presentations will also be uploaded somewhere online soon.)
The one-day event was co-organized by Erica O’ Grady, a social media dynamo. She is doing big things and will do bigger things with all this social media stuff. Get to know Erica on her blog and follow her on Twitter.
The line-up of presenters hand-picked for the event were outstanding.
Besides Kelsey, Giovanni Gallucci (aka Digg the Link Hunter) shared his take on how to maximize links and views. Steve Latham outlined a few methods to measure the ROI of social media marketing campaigns. Stephen Anderson delivered a thought-provoking presentation on how design matters in social media. Ed Schipul entertained and informed us about how tapping into the 3 Motivations of People can help non-profits (and for-profits) make a difference. And, Laura Mayes sprinkled smart tid-bits throughout the day. (Unfortunately, I missed Chris Bernard and his presentation.)
I'm figuring some of you can help Julia. She's looking for the "worst ad campaign" from last year. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments section. Thanks.
Here's Julia's email:
"My name is Julia, and I am a marketing student doing my undergrad at McGill University. I am currently in an Advertising Management class, and we have been assigned to take what we think was the "worst ad campaign of 2007/2008" and pretty much fix it. I was wondering if you may have any bad ad campaigns in mind."
“Remixing is about taking something that already exists and redefining it in your own personal creative space, reinterpreting someone else’s work your way. [It’s about] taking an idea and making it suitable for a whole new audience.” — Matt Mason, THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA
Consider the following post a remix of Matt Mason’s THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA. The twist I’m adding is whittling down the gist of Matt’s message into a WHAT — SO WHAT — WHAT NOW structure. The WHAT is the core of Matt’s idea. The SO WHAT explains why the WHAT matters. And the WHAT NOW is advice on how to action upon the WHAT.
NOTE: All direct samples lifted from Mason’s original work, THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA, are quoted in italics.
WHAT:
“Entrepreneurs look for gaps in the market. Pirates look for gaps outside of the market. By thinking like pirates, people grow niche audiences to a critical mass and change the mainstream from the bottom-up.”
Tomoaki Nagao is a Pirate entrepreneur impacting the sneaker trade. Nagao remixed Nike’s Air Force One basketball shoe in garish colors and high-gloss patent leather. The result of this remixed shoe is the sought-after and super-expensive BapeSta shoe line (known as Bapes). Thanks to the success of Bapes, Nike has reintroduced the Air Force One shoe in similar garish colors. Not a surprising move for Nike given that its co-founder and leader, Phil Knight, is an O.P. (Original Pirate) having rocked the sneaker trade in the early 70s.
“Finding a space to get your idea across is as important as having the idea itself. If the idea is good, growing an audience won’t be difficult. It’s the audience that gives pirates their power.” Shawn Fanning’s Pirate prowess was boosted when his idea went viral. At one point, 70-million people were freely sharing MP3s using Fanning’s ultimate pirate creation—Napster.
The entire music industry business model has been rocked by Napster and other peer-to-peer music sharing programs. However, “as quickly as society figures out new ways to share ideas that advance the common good, private interests move in to stop this from happening, to maintain the old systems that benefit only the elite.” The music industry levied a litany of legal charges against Napster, forcing this Pirate business to reform its rock-the-boat ways and go from a free service to a paid service.
The music industry is still waging legal battles against free download sites. But the irrevocable damage has been down. Pirates have forever changed how people view the accessibility, portability, and usability of music. The music industry is facing the “PIRATE’S DILEMMA” of how to respond when an outside force finds new ways to “share information, intellectual property, and public space” that bypasses the capitalistic models of the old guard.
In Matt Mason’s words, do you “fight these pirates, or accept that there is some value in what they are doing, and compete with them?” That’s the dilemma facing businesses in all types of industries.
Mason believes “resistance if futile” and if you choose to ignore the Pirate-created market or choose not to adapt to the changing marketplace … you will lose. The solution to THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA, according to Mason, is to act like a Pirate by “recognizing the pirate within” and to view disrupted markets not as problems, but as opportunities.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an online essay for Brandweek magazine where I referenced SENDaBALL as having an unconventional business service that requires its customers to think before they purchase. (Sending a ball through the mail, with no box ... just the ball. Huh? Really?) My reference included an embedded link to SENDaBALL.com. The other day a surprise landed in my mailbox — a SENDaBALL.
Michele, from SENDaBALL, followed up with an email thanking me after she noticed a bump in traffic to their website from my online essay. Mucho kudos to SENDaBALL. They monitor the blogosphere and acknowledge mentions in only a way SENDaBALL can.
What happens next? I blog about it and I also purchase two SENDaBALLs ... one for my niece and one for my nephew.
This morning a gathering of Tech Plan employees, friends, and family participated in the Dallas-area MDA Stride & Ride charity walk. Sporting their “Glenna’s Warriors” baseball jerseys, this group walked to raise money for MDA & ALS research and to celebrate the memory of my mother, Glenna Moore.
My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Linda Chrissey who not only organized this year’s gather of Tech Plan folks but also last year’s group. Thank you Linda for taking the time to make this happen and for spearheading the $20,000-plus in donations that Tech Plan has raised to support the fight against the ALS disease.
My heartfelt appreciation also goes out to entire Glenna’s Warriors army who joined my Dad this morning to lend emotional, physical, and financial support for a cause dear to everyone who knew (and loved) Glenna Moore. THANK YOU!!!
Fascinating post from Jens Alfke, a just-resigned Apple employee — read it here. (Thanks to Steve Chazin for the hook-up.)
In this post, Jens reveals his dissatisfaction with Apple’s reluctance to embrace the open source/social software culture. Other "creative differences" causing this 16-year Apple veteran to leave include the lack of individual expression and celebration within the company.
For us outsiders, this post gives us an illuminating (and incriminating) look into the closed cultural ethos at Apple. Here’s a tasty snippet…
“It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?It wasn’t always this way. Apple was very open in the beginning, and treated the members of the original Mac team like rock stars, complete with photo layouts in Rolling Stone. Their signatures were engraved in the inside of the computer’s case. Even in my early years there, applications’ “about boxes” proudly listed the names of the people who worked on them. The OS itself had semi-secret easter eggs that listed everyone’s name. The developer Tech Notes were bylined with the names of the individual engineers who wrote them.
Nowadays, unless you’re a vice president, the only time Apple consents to show your name is if you give a talk at the Worldwide Developers’ Conference, a rather pricey annual event.”
Brains on Fire, a marketing agency in Greenville (South Carolina), has offered me a unique opportunity to become a Marketer-in-Residence with them. I gladly accepted. So, throughout this year, I’ll be working with Brains on Fire to help influence how they turn innovative ideas into actionable tactics for their clients.
Brains on Fire positions itself as an “Identity Company.” Meaning, they help businesses better communicate their brand to customers. But really, they work with businesses to better understand their unique personality and then better express that unique personality to customers. The result is creating movements that fascinate, inspire, reward, and engage people to spread their passion for the brand (or cause) via a variety of word-of-mouth marketing ways.
I’ve been an admirer of their work on the South Carolina anti-teen smoking movement (Rage Against the Haze) and their more recent work with Fiskars, the scissors company. The Fiskateers brand ambassador program created by Brains on Fire is one of the most genuine and meaningful word-of-mouth marketing programs I’ve seen in action.
I’m thrilled to have been asked to become a Marketer-in-Residence with Brains on Fire. As such, I'll serve a short residency working as a full-time BOF employee, followed by monthly office visits, and on-going communication. Brains on Fire has some interesting projects on the docket for 2008 that I can’t wait to help them make marketing magic happen.
Check out Chris’ tasty riff in the comments section of my Starbucks One-Dollar Cup o’ Joe post. This reference had me laughing …
“If Howard, like John Cusack holding the tape player outside the window in "Say Anything," is using this a tactic to make me pay attention so that he can look deep in my eyes and tell me he's sorry--I might listen if the words and actions seem sincere and real change follows.” [source]
And that reference inspired “Bobby Breve” to send me this visual. Beautiful. (Thanks Bobby.)
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once said, “Our marketing will emphasize quality and service, not price.” He’s now doing something different.
In a bigger shift in marketing strategy than spending millions on national television advertising, Starbucks is now selling short-sized cups of brewed coffee for a $1.00 and offering free refills at Seattle-area locations. (Reuters link | WSJ link)
Oh My! That is a MAJOR shift in strategy for Starbucks. Here’s why…
“Starbucks fiercely protects its pricing power because it knows a low-price strategy is the quickest pathway to commoditizing and marginalizing coffee back to being, well, just coffee. It also knows if it lowers prices, it will have a hard time ever raising them again. Most important of all, Starbucks knows higher prices bring them healthier profit margins, which fuel the cozy experience customers enjoy.By ever deciding to run itself as a priced-to-sell retailer, Starbucks would be admitting it no longer values a unique product or a unique customer experience. Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, goes one step further, saying that a low-price strategy is “the last refuge of a…marketer who is out of great ideas.” The folks at Starbucks are too smart, too savvy, and too creative to fall for the low-price trap. And if they ever did, Starbucks as we know it—Starbucks as a forward-thinking company—would cease to exist.”
SOURCE
Those words were written in TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE, my love story to a company that shaped how I approach marketing. In my eight-years there, we, Starbucks marketers, would have never considered promoting a $1 Cup o’Joe to increase sales. Instead, we would have used of a combination of these ideas to solve for Starbucks problems.
A "cheap coffee strategy" ... Oh My! is right; because, a low-price strategy is indeed the quickest pathway to commoditizing and marginalizing coffee back to being, well, just coffee.
I’m re:visiting Tom Peters’ Re:imagine! and stumbled upon this chewy management ditty on leadership…
Leaders Are Rarely the Best PerformersA symphony conductor is usually a good musician, but seldom a world-class performer. The most effective university deans are often not the best professors. The ability to lead … to Engage Others and to Turn Them On … rarely coincides with being at the tip-top of the … Individual Performance Heap.
Which is not to say that leaders shouldn’t have a fingertip familiarity with their particular line of business. But the factors that make you good at the “people stuff” and the “inspirational stuff” and the “profit-making stuff” are quite distinct from the factors that vault you to the Pinnacle of Individual Mastery.
In business, alas, it’s all too common to promote the “best” practitioner to the job of leading other practitioners. The best trainer becomes head of the training department. The best account manager becomes head of the sales department. And so on. Tellingly, that’s not how things work in … True Talent Enterprises.
So why do we go that route in business? Beats me. Gross stupidity? Maybe. But more likely: a refusal to see that leadership is … a discrete, limited, special quality.
Mega-selling recording artist Natalie Merchant doesn’t have a recording contract with a major label these days. The digital download era has rendered many top-selling artists, like Ms. Merchant, unattractive and irrelevant as it relates major labels releasing newly recorded CDs.
Writing in the New York Times, John Pareles tells us, “Ms. Merchant is back to the age-old economic model of the troubadour. People who want to hear her latest songs will have to see her perform them.”
The free market has decided it likes its recorded music more or less free and not from buying a music CD. But the free market has also decided it will pay to see a musician perform live, like Natalie Merchant. Her week-long residency at Hiro’s sold-out within hours of being announced and a sixth show was added to meet demand.
Yes, the game has changed, but has it changed as much as Natalie Merchant suggests? Only those few artists in the thick end of the long tail ever made significant money from CD sales. But those musicians in the long tail have made their money from touring and not from CD sales.
Generally speaking, a recording artist on a major label can expect to make $1.00 per CD sold. When an artist (or band) signs with a music label they are given an advance to produce a CD. Out of that advance, the artist must pay for studio time, pay the band, pay a producer, pay most marketing and promotion expenses (which includes the making of any music video), and pay for a slew of miscellaneous expenses. Most musicians exhaust their entire advance to release a major-label CD.
In order to make substantial money from a major label-issued CD, the artist needs to sell A LOT of copies. Those artists in the thick end of the long tail make money from CD sales, while those in the long tail don’t. Artists working in the long tail must tour from city-to-city and earn money from ticket sales, percentage take from drinks sales at the venue, merchandise sales, etc. Essentially, CDs (or MP3s) for long tail artists are marketing collateral pieces to get someone to buy a ticket to see them perform live. This way, the artist makes money.
Knowing all this, what's a troubadour to do?
My advice for Natalie Merchant is to not deprive her adoring fans of hearing new, recorded music. At the least, she should record live shows and sell them to her devoted fans on her website and at her live shows. She should also consider giving away her recorded music for free.
Why give away her recorded music for free? As mentioned, a CD or an MP3 file is essentially a direct mail piece to get someone to buy a concert ticket. If indeed a musician can make more money from selling tickets to a live show, shouldn’t they market themselves to sell tickets and not CDs?
Hmm … maybe that’s what a troubadour should do.
Continuing my “Would you Miss” series ...
What say you?
Post inspiration | Mavericks at Work
ONE | The Rage of Conversation
Drew McLellan, Gavin Heaton, and others are in for a second go-round with The Age of Conversation. Advertising Age lauded this project, now you can join it. A call to action has been issued for any marketer wanting to author a piece for the 2008 version of The Age of Conversation.
Paul Williams (from Idea Sandbox) has resurrected a version of the Business Blog Book Tour (BBBT) which Todd Sattersten began years ago. Paul’s version is called Post2Post and will work much like the BBBT did where an author goes on a blog junket discussing ideas from their book.
Seth Godin is first-up and Brand Autopsy is hosting day one of the Post2Post tour talking about Seth’s newest book, MEATBALL SUNDAE.
I’ve worked up three posts sharing tid-bits and such from MEATBALL SUNDAE. Have a look-see and a read-through:
from the Post2Post tour highlighting Seth Godin’s MEATBALL SUNDAE…
Remember the classic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial where two different tastes combine? It went something like this …
Seth says the flavor of Old Marketing is about “… interrupting masses of people with ads about average products.” New Marketing, according to Seth, has a flavor that “… treats every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media.” Promoting products and services using a marketing mix of television commercials, print ads, and billboards is Old Marketing. While, promoting products and services using non-traditional marketing methods that invite influential customers to spread the word is New Marketing.
The problem is, as Seth sees it, Old Marketing-based companies are so anxious to embrace New Marketing ways that they end up with a MEATBALL SUNDAE—two great tastes that DO NOT taste great together.
Wal-Mart created a MEATBALL SUNDAE when they decided to combine their Old Marketing strategy of promoting low prices to the masses through traditional advertising with the New Marketing ways of social media consumer generated media. The result of this combination was THE HUB, a myspace wannabe that failed miserably.
Anheuser-Busch created a MEATBALL SUNDAE with its Bud TV marketing initiative. Eager to capitalize on viral online marketing goings-on to reach twentysomething beer drinkers, Anheuser-Busch has routed over $40-million from their television advertising marketing budget to create an online entertainment network called Bud.TV. Launched in the fall of 2006 with aspirations of becoming the next YouTube, Bud.TV has failed to catch-on and is in danger of being axed.
Wal-Mart and Anheuser-Busch are mainstays of Old Marketing. They are accustomed to accosting consumers with a blitzkrieg of mass media advertising to influence their buying behavior. Given that, are we surprised their New Marketing follies failed? The go-to-business ethos at Wal-Mart and Anheuser-Busch isn’t built for New Marketing.
Seth isn’t advocating all companies eschew Old Marketing for New Marketing. Instead, he’s saying, “Don’t use the tactics of one paradigm and the strategies of another and hope you’ll get the best of both worlds. You won’t.”
What Seth is advocating is twofold, “First, the structure of organizations needs to radically adapt to this new model. Second, products need to be designed that don’t depend on old-school advertising but instead spread on their own.”
Throughout MEATBALL SUNDAE, Seth outlines 14 New Marketing trends and showcases how enduring and emerging companies are successfully using those trends to create marketing magic and not a meatball sundae.
from the Post2Post tour highlighting Seth Godin’s MEATBALL SUNDAE…
from the Post2Post tour highlighting Seth Godin’s MEATBALL SUNDAE…
What’s your favorite pizza topping?
SETH: I don't eat cheese. I like arugula, really good anchovies and yes, Union Square cherry tomatoes. If yuppies didn't exist, I'd have to invent them.
Have you ever had a crush on a celebrity? If so, tell all!
Well, I had a crush on Tom Peters for a while...
If you were abducted by aliens, what CD, book, and movie would you bring along for the ride?
This is usually a trick question, because you need something that's either really long and violates the spirit of the question or is repeatable. So, in that spirit, I'm going to go with Wikipedia on CD.
What’s in heavy rotation on your iPod?
I have an EP from Georgie James, then there's audio from Pema Chodron and piano from Keith Jarrett. And the Monkees, of course. I had a long long Fatboy Slim period as well.
Do you have any pets? If so, tell us about them.
Woodie the wonder dog. The usual. Oh yes, and Fisheye, who's a tarantula. Megan has a parrot named Doctor Jones.
What’s your favorite vegan dish?
All my favorite dishes are vegan. I particularly like really good brown rice with tofu and tahini and dulse and boy do I sound like a crackpot or what?
Who’s better Soulja Boy or T-Pain?
Soulja Boy has a dance for god sake! Do you have a dance? I don't.
What’s your guiltiest pleasure?
85% and up dark chocolate, plain, a square a day whether I need it or not. Scharffenberger is my home skillet.
What do you do when you chill?
Chill?
When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?
Don't be stupid. Nobody takes a picture of cheese.
When the 2007 year-end tallies are calculated, Amazon is expected to have grown revenues to $15 billion, an increase of 35.0% from the year prior. The company counts 72-million active customers who spent, on average, $184 on Amazon.com last year. Profit margins, which have been as low as 3.0%, have increased to 6.0%. Amazon is making money.
Amazon is also making customers happy. Ed Nocera, writing in the New York Times, thinks profit and sales-growth at Amazon is a by-product of making customers happy.
Ed purchased a PlayStation 3 as a gift from Amazon this Holiday. Concerned the package hadn’t arrived yet, Ed tracked the shipment from Amazon’s website. He learned the package had arrived and a neighbor had signed for it. Ed asked his neighbor about the package and learned she put the package in the hallway after signing for it.
Ed knew his PS3 was MIA so he managed to find Amazon’s customer service phone number and explained his situation to the customer service rep. Amazon shipped out a replacement PlayStation3 and on Christmas Day, Ed’s son was happy. And so was Ed.
Curious about Amazon’s stock performance, Ed looked it up and saw it had risen about 140% in the past year. Wall Street types credit the Amazon run-up to improved margins, international expansion, its web services business, and to increased sales with its reseller merchant market affiliates.
Ed has a different take,
I couldn’t help wondering if maybe there wasn’t something else at play here, something Wall Street never seems to take very seriously. Maybe, just maybe, taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company. Maybe, in fact, it’s the best way to build a real business — even if it comes at the expense of short-term results.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and Founder, appeared recently on The Charlie Rose Show and had this to say about his obsession with customers,
“They [Aamzon customers] care about having the lowest prices, having vast selection, so they have choice, and getting the products to customers fast. And the reason I’m so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.”
Ed Nocera closes his article with this gem,
There is simply no question that Mr. Bezos’s obsession with his customers — and the long term — has paid off, even if he had to take some hits to the stock price along the way. Surely, it was worth it. As for me, the $500 favor the company did for me this Christmas will surely rebound in additional business down the line. Why would I ever shop anywhere else online? Then again, there may be another reason good customer service makes sense.“Jeff used to say that if you did something good for one customer, they would tell 100 customers,” said Suresh Kotha, a management professor at the University of Washington business school.
I guess that’s what I just did.
Last year about this time Micheal Dell returned to his CEO post at the company he founded. Under Kevin Rollins’s CEO leadership, Dell’s market share hit a four-year low and growth prospects were grim. Rollins resigned and Dell reclaimed his CEO role.
Last year about this time Howard Schultz sent a memo to his Starbucks executive team challenging them to get smarter about how they are running the company and to get back to the company's core business. Starbucks CEO Jim Donald was charged with driving sales and driving innovation at the company. In 2007, Starbucks stock value fell 48% and the company reported its first every year-over-year drop in customer traffic. Donald is out and Schultz is back as CEO.
The jury is still deliberating on Michael Dell and the turnaround of his company.
The jury is just convening about Howard Schultz and the turnaround of his company.
For the most riveting and rambunctious discussion about this unexpected CEO change-over at Starbucks, read the comments on the Starbucks Gossip blog.
Sensing an opportunity to further democratize espresso, McDonald’s is moving full throttle into the espresso beverage business. Currently, 800 of McDonald’s U.S. locations offer lattes, cappuccinos, and frappes. By 2009, most U.S. McDonald’s locations will be selling coffee drinks ranging in price from $1.99 to $3.29. McDonald’s believes an expanded coffee menu will add about $1-billion in yearly sales.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Janet Adamy reports,
The program attempts to replicate the Starbucks experience in many ways -- starting with borrowing the barista moniker. Espresso machines will be displayed at the front counters, a big shift for a company that has always hidden its food assembly from customers. McDonald's says it wants customers to see the coffee beans being ground and baristas topping the mochas and Frappes with whipped cream."You create a little bit more of a theater there," says John Betts, McDonald's vice president of national beverage strategy.
The theater element, of having employees preparing food while interacting with customers, is a major shift in company culture for the operationally-efficient McDonald’s system. In the article, Adamy mentions how McDonald’s franchisees have been instructed to hire people who are “very friendly.”
That’s a start to bringing more theatrics to a customer’s McDonald’s experience, but why is hiring “very friendly” people a new behavior for McDonald’s? (Hmm.)
The people component to delivering customer experiences is ultra-important to McDonald’s — more important than the actual coffee beverage program. Why? Because Starbucks competitors can replicate products and programs, but they can’t replicate people.
In TRIBAL KNOWLEDGE, my book sharing business lessons I learned from Starbucks, I wrote about this topic saying …
These coffee companies have tried and are trying to replicate the products and experiences Starbucks delivers, but they can’t replicate the people Starbucks has delivering the products and experiences to customers.
Products do not create brands, people create brands. It’s the people that matter more in creating a brand than the product itself. And Starbucks places a tremendous emphasis on hiring the right people to deliver exceptional products and meaningful experiences to customers.
When hiring employees for store-level and corporate-level positions, Starbucks looks for the following upstanding “people” qualities in each candidate: genuineness, conscientiousness, knowledge, and involvement.
Genuineness
Genuine people build solid relationships with others because they are approachable and likeable. Starbucks employees who are genuine make for great team members, and they can be trusted to deliver heartfelt customer service.
Conscientiousness
A conscientious employee is one who is considerate and pays attention to seemingly insignificant details because everything matters to them. And since “everything matters” at Starbucks, this quality is of utmost importance in all employees Starbucks chooses to hire.
Knowledge
Starbucks employees are expected to know coffee to the extent that they will confidently share their coffee knowledge with customers. To find employees with this quality, Starbucks looks for people who ask questions. Asking questions at Starbucks is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of strength. Inquisitive employees lead to knowledgeable employees and knowledgeable employees are quicker to share their expertise with others.
Involvement
Employees who get involved within the company and within their community are valued at Starbucks. When employees take the time to get involved and make connections with others, they showcase a caring soul. Starbucks seeks to hire caring souls because they are more likely to make emotional connections with people.
As Adamy writes, “Still, the new coffee program is a risky bet for McDonald's. It could slow down operations and alienate customers who come to McDonald's for cheap, simple fare rather than theatrics.”
The Simpsons movie tie-in with 7-11 got lots of digital ink last summer. Marketers, like Jake McKee, raved about it and shared photos galore. Evangelists created a blog about it. Even Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield cooed about it.
No doubt ... 3 out of 4 marketers would agree this movie promotion was a creative success. What about a sales success? After all, sales is the true measure of a marketing campaign.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the promotion was a sales success.
"The 7-Eleven chain ... saw major sales lifts at the 11 U.S. stores that were converted for the month of the promotion. The company says total merchandise sales doubled; fresh bakery sales increased sevenfold and customer count went up almost 50%.Moreover, 7-Eleven says the promotion garnered about $7 million in free publicity. The 7-Eleven Web site on July 11 received 10,420,730 hits. The site typically gets an average of about 400,000 hits a day."
Not sure who pointed me to this interview with Nick Morgan, but I’m glad they did.
Nick is a communication and speech coach and his book, GIVE A SPEECH, CHANGE THE WORLD is a must-read for all us business folk who get up in front of people and speak. This interview with Management Consulting News serves as a nice summary of the presentation advice Nick shares in his book.
Money quotes from the interview include:
“The wonderful thing about audiences is that they want to be enthralled and moved. They come in with a positive attitude in spite of the fact that they have been disappointed so many times. Audiences want you to succeed.”
“That support is yours to squander. If you fail to connect, midway through your speech the audience will no longer be on your side--they will be looking for the exits.”
“That's what charisma is--emotional expressiveness, the ability to show a range of genuine emotions. But I don't mean weeping or losing your temper. Rather, you need to let an audience know how you feel about what is important to you, when you are excited about something and when you are displeased with something.”
BACKSTORY | In the book, MAVERICKS AT WORK, the authors included a very provocative question every business must ask itself: "If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why?” That inspired me to run a series of posts in 2007 asking if you would miss a certain business if it went out business.
I'm restarting the “Would You Miss” series with a question about The Cheesecake Factory.
What say you?
The Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford from 2005 has made the rounds many times over online. I read the transcript two years ago and was moved. Now, I’m moved again because I’ve listened to (and watched) the commencement address.
The audio (and video) is now available on iTunes.
(Once iTunes opens up, look on the right-hand column under “Top Downloads” and you’ll find the Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement Address. If you do not use iTunes, use this link to listen/watch.)
Since it’s the beginning of 2008, I suggest taking 15-minutes this week to be inspired by Jobs’ story of staying hungry and staying foolish. I’m burning a copy to share with my Father.
Kudos to Dan Pink for the hook-up.
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