Big Ideas

Communicating with your customers takes on many many forms

This piece in the New York Times is a great story about the steps which Apple takes to make sure that it's setting a different expectation with many of its customers, both current and potential:

Inside Apple Stores, a Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful - New York Times

Many companies don't think about the fact that the promises that they make and the messages that they send to customers take on many different forms. Let's look at the examples illustrated in this article alone:

• The ways in which a company treats you when you're not spending money are highly important. The fact that Ms. Jade was dealt with respectfully and supportively communicates to her and to us, reading this story, that Apple is pretty easy going and accepting of the fact that they don't have to make money from everyone who benefits from Apple's offerings.
• The messages a company sends when you want to buy, but need help are highly important. Apple tries to make sure there are enough knowledgeable people around to answer your questions and not make you feel like you're wasting their time - that the CUSTOMER is the focus. Look around at many stores you go to - that doesn't often feel like it's the case.
• The way the company answers your request to buy is very important. When I'm ready to give you my money I don't want to wait. I don't want to deal with someone who doesn't know how to work the cash register. In this day and age, shouldn't more stores be able to just swipe my card and let me go.. fast?

All of these messages are communicated in a company's interactions with its customers. Whether they're in person, online, over the phone, via mailed correspondence, via their advertising campaigns, through the actual products and services etc.., every company interacts with its customers in a myriad of ways and they shape the consumer's view of the company. For the past few years, the communications coming from Apple have been massively aligned and extraordinarily strong. Apple is cool, it's easy, it's fun, it's well-designed and it's never a mistake to buy it. These are the messages I'm seeing coming from almost everything that the company is doing. It's also why I've been an investor in the company for a while.

How does your company communicate with its customers (current and potential)? Even better: how could we think about making companies more effective and intelligent at it?

 

Technorati Tags: customer communication, messaging, branding, customer experience

Great Podcast from Seth Godin and Bryan Eisenberg

Excellent discussion of what marketing looks like today and how differently companies need to think about their approach to reaching customers. The reality is, Seth's been thinking and talking about these ideas for many many years and he's still WAY ahead of the curve. The vast majority of large companies still believe that blasting TV ads is the best way to get their message out. However, as he points out, that creates a lot of opportunity right now for those of us who see the situation differently. Something to go take advantage of :) Have a listen and let me know what you think.

 

Webmaster Radio
Meatball Sundae Best selling author Seth Godin speaks about his new book, Meatball Sundae, discusses how he came up with the book and provides expample of companies who are applying this allegory. Show Host: Bryan Eisenberg Show: Blog Buzz Channel: Internet Marketing

 

 

Technorati Tags: Seth Godin, Bryan Eisenberg, Meatball Sundae podcast, Marketing, Customer communication

This is what Politics in America looks like today

When reading this piece in the NY Times today on Hillary Clinton, I can't help but get sad.

When I was 8, I wanted to be President.

I believed it, not just in the "I'm 8 and I don't understand the world and just want the coolest looking job I can see" way, but really, because I wanted to do something really good. I thought, "I'm smart, I'm good, I can be President and really make a difference". Now, you could call that childhood naivete on my part, but the thing is, that desire grew stronger the older I got. But the older I got, the more the game of Politics continued to shift.

Hillary Clinton is the FIRST LEGITIMATE FEMALE PRESIDENTIAL candidate the U.S. has ever had. This is monumental. But the reality is, in order to get there, she's had to endure ridiculous scrutiny, pain and embarrassment.. in public. She's had to raise a daughter, suffer through an extramarital affair and lead her life on camera for 15 years. And still, "the public" looks at her and thinks things like "ice queen", "insensitive", "boring" etc. WTF?!? Wouldn't you quit by now or be the biggest a-hole ever, if you had to go through what she has?

And it's not just Hillary who has to deal with this. All of our candidates do, in different ways. Look at Mitt Romney and the focus on his religion. Or Obama, the wunderkind, who's played about in the media as the malleable storyline that can be used to spice any campaign discussion up. One day, he's an inspiring once-in-a-generation speaker of truth and the next, he's portrayed as the inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois who is all talk and no substance.

It's maddening. I used to want to be President. For 12 years, every day that desire got stronger. And then I realized that there was NO WAY I could endure the lives that these politicians have to lead in order to do what they do.

These people, the politicians, they're supposed to be OUR EMPLOYEES. We choose them, we pay them, we ask them to go solve big problems for us. And we treat them like utter crap.

Isn't it time that we woke up to this fact? If you manage people and you treat them this way, you're not going to have those people doing very good work for you, I can promise you that. So why is it different for our politicians?

Shame on us. We need to fix this if we want a different kind of President.

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential Election, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Politics in America