Posts for June 2009

The Real Thing?

You can argue that the aim of marketing is to build momentum. You need to raise awareness and establish how people perceive your brand. Traditionally this worked well, but I have news for you -- attempting to set perceptions is becoming an increasingly dangerous strategy. You may recall a marketing campaign that had the sole intention of altering your perception of a brand. A soft drinks manufacturer who specialised in blackcurrant-based drinks had complaints about the sugar content and related tooth decay. This caused it to launch a low sugar version. It even had the cojones to sell it as “Toothkind”. The rebranding promoted health benefits and claimed four times the vitamin C levels of rivals. The inconvenient truth proved the product wasn’t good for your teeth and one drink in the range had negligible vitamin C! This little oversight cost the company significant sums of money. But the real stinker was the “corrective advertisements” it was forced to run on national television. It’s always been dangerous to try to build a false perception. Now the rise of social networking has upped the ante. There has been a seismic shift in our abilities to interact and talk to each other, and to build or rubbish brands that annoy us. We are the mob, and the mob is now all seeing. If you are bluffing, it won’t take long for people to find you out. It’s simple; the quality of your offering builds the perceptions. These will be based on fact and customer experience, not marketing spin. Ignore this at your peril.

The Art Of Fighting Without Fighting... And Good Customer Service

In the film ‘Enter The Dragon’ Bruce Lee demonstrated the ‘art of fighting without fighting’ in which he shrewdly avoided a conflict by not allowing it to happen in the first place. The same idea could be relevant for small businesses who rely on customer service.

Customer service has always been important but is now even more so with the changing nature of the online environment. If people are unhappy with service they are receiving it is now easier than ever to make these feelings known online. A quick tweet or facebook group about poor service received can potentially spiral out of control and be very damaging to a small business. For example, a restaurant which has upset one of its customers through poor service might be subject to some bad publicity online in a relatively short space of time. It may be as easy as getting on an iPhone or Blackberry and letting thoughts be known to the whole internet community. Customers are increasingly looking online for information on businesses so having and maintaining a good reputation on the internet is getting more and more crucial.

Recently there was the case of two Dominos kitchen employees who managed to cause a stir with a YouTube video showing them contaminating food. This video was viewed by literally millions of people and lead to the quick dismissal of the employees involved but only after significant damage to the reputation of Dominos. In the last few days Twitter postponed its scheduled maintenance in response to the continuing developments of the Iranian Election. Twitter and other social media tools are being used to by Iranian citizens to communicate with the outside world and are bound to play an important part in the final outcome. This illustrates the power that online tools can have.

In the case of small businesses, it is now essential that they get their customer service and training of staff right to avoid possible online crises. It sounds obvious but I have experienced this myself with a hotel I stayed at in Cardiff. I received a pretty lack-lustre service from them all round and wrote a critical review the next day on a hotel review site which was read by over one hundred people at last count. While a large hotel chain may not see this as so much of an issue; it could be quite a serious problem for a small business.

Obviously having opinions about a business be they positive or negative are fair game and should be shared online but, as businesses know, there will be customers who will never be happy and are intent on creating as much of a fuss as possible. If the customer concerns are legitimate the business should take this as feedback and a chance to improve their service. However, if the comments are misguided or deliberately malicious the business should have an Online Crisis Strategy to cope with these situations.

Often the best way to deal with such issues is avoiding them in the first place but failing that it is essential to have some idea of what you are going to do when the unexpected happens.