You see Bad Oldeslo is home to GlaxoSmithKline Deutchland who manufactures Volmax. Volmax is one of the four ingredients that make up long-acting beta2 agonists, the most common form of Asthma treatment that most of us would call a puffer or inhaler. With the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s release that up to 30% of Canadians living with asthma have been misdiagnosed, I can’t help but visualize the German GSK acting out like a Stride Gum commercial this morning.

Report author Shawn Aaron and the crew that put this report together, have possibly uncovered one of the greatest medical oversight’s in modern medicine. In simpleton terms, this means that in a room of ten asthma sufferers, THREE OF THEM  SHOULD NOT EVEN BE IN THE ROOM. This is either, an incredible black mark on public health care that highlights what happens when you overwork an industry to a point where detail regarding the healthy lifestyles of our communities is passed over for productivity and benchmarking, or this story is the perfect plot line for the next James Bond film!

I started looking at this story through cbcnews.ca, and I think this quote got me rilled up the most.

Physicians are under a lot of pressure to manage a lot of patients quickly,” Aaron said. “For a patient who comes in complaining of shortness of breath and wheeze, it’s much more easy and it takes much less time to say, ‘I think you have asthma, take this puffer.

What’s worse is I don’t know who the fault ultimately falls on for this collective gaffe? Do we blame the overworked and underfunded health care system that needs to implement quantity over quality to meet demand? Or maybe there is some real world Ernst Stavro Blofeld character running around plotting human demise with the use of inhalers and Ritalin (don’t get me started on ADHD). Or is it possible that we ultimately need to point the finger at the concept of public health care at its root?

For any readers from Bad Oldesloe, take a deep breath I am sure you will all be fine.

The way to do this would be to use the flight as a targeted sample for snack products. By providing free snacks on an otherwise snack-less flight the snack company gets exclusive access to a specific passenger feedback either by completing cards before exiting the aircraft or by going online post-flight and completing a survey for a chance to win a prize. On an even more recent flight with Porter Airlines, Terra Chips were offered as a snack option, and I upon landing tried three different grocery stores before finally securing a bag. They were that good. What do you think? Is in-flight try-vertising a viable solution for airlines intent on cutting costs? Let me know in the comments.

As a somewhat related aside, here’s a clip from Mad TV on budget airlines…

Not ever, not even once.

Talk around it, talk over it, talk under it but never about it.

Why not talk about your product? Simple. You’re too close to it. No one will believe you. So talk about what other people are saying, experiencing and sharing about your product instead.

I’m not talking testimonials here either, I’m talking about real stories about real people with real experiences. Stories in their own voices.

It’s what people say about a product that speaks, not the the product.

1. Loss Limited to Initial Investment - You can and probably will, lose all the money you invested, but hey, at least you didn’t lose more than you invested.

2. Including but not Limited to… - Basically, if anything goes wrong you can’t blame us for anything, especially the stuff we haven’t even thought of.

3. 15% Restocking Fee Applies – There really is no return policy, but we know that customers like that sort of thing so we advertise it. If you really want your money back you may be able to resell the junk we just sold you on Craigslist for more than 85% of what you paid for it. (If you’re lucky.)

4. Automatically Renewed for Your Convenience – We love taking money from you! Especially when you don’t even know we’re doing it!

5. 24/7 Customer Service – As long as you call any time between 9 & 5, eastern standard time of course.

6. We have Customer Service People Waiting to Serve You! – Only if you know enough to push 0 or # and have speaker phone so you can do something productive while we keep you on hold for about an hour, hoping that you will get frustrated, hang up, and stop bothering us.

7. Lowest Prices in Town – Until you go to Walmart and see the exact same thing for half the price.

8. Guaranteed Credit on Approval – I hope your kids really like whatever you’re buying because because they’ll be making payments on it too!

9. 30 Minutes or it’s Free – Only if you’re prepared to argue with the delivery guy for an additional 30 minutes.

10. Rebate – We don’t really like low prices, we just pretend we do because customers seem to like it. Really, we’re just hoping you buy and forget about the whole rebate thing because we’ve made it so difficult and complicated in an effort to put you off.

So after reading this list you may tempted to think that all marketers are liars and that marketing is all about telling lies. However, this isn’t the case at all. As I argued in an earlier post, fundamentally, marketing is about storytelling. The difficulty in telling stories is that they set expectations and create visions in the consumer psyche. I call this phenomena a Benefit Scenario. This is what every ad and marketing campaign is designed to do. It tells us a story about a version of ourselves that is better in some way, that has benefited by partaking in a particular product. The challenge is then live up to that the promise of that story. Unfortunately, it is too often the case that companies say one thing and do another, creating what I refer to as an Experience Gap. I’ve boiled it down to simple formula:

Benefit Scenario – Execution = Experience Gap

In the same way that a brilliant play enacted by amateur performers is no longer brilliant, great marketing without great execution only creates disillusionment which leads to disappointment and finally disengagement. The right formula is simple: Say what you mean and do what you say.

Photo credit: *Silihari*

There is nothing a company wants more than to cultivate a love affair with customers. Now what’s wrong with that sentence? Well nothing really, besides the fact that its usually a LIE, and a pretty brazen one at that.

Sadly, most corporations only preach this without actually practicing it. They prefer to behave like detached creatures that loathe closeness and recoil at the slightest twinge of customer affection. They prefer “customer adoption” and “customer retention” to customer affection. They shrink back from the warm embrace of their most ardent fans.

Case in point, whenever customers become so enamored with some product or service that they are willing to contribute to its well being and development by devoting copious amounts of their own free time to improving upon it, they get sued. Think Scrabulous here. Two brothers who are fans of the classic Scrabble board game create a Facebook application based on it. It becomes popular, really popular. So popular in fact that Hasbro & Mattel, the owners of the rights to the game decided to take legal action against brothers who are now pulling in about $25 000 a month on something they did on a whim based on their enjoyment of the game. What they intuitively recognized as fans of the game of Scrabble is that playing the game is a social act. It is best enjoyed when playing against family and friends and even better when you have a wide variety of opponents to challenge. What better place to connect to friends and family and huge number of possible opponents than a social network? Furthermore, they realized that it is not necessarily possible to finish a game of Scrabble in one sitting so they designed it in such a way that games could be played over long periods of time at the leisure of the players.

This really illustrates the heightened insight of the most devout customers. I mean who is really in better position to understand the customer psyche? Is it the guys sitting in the “Ivory Tower Boardroom” trying to figure out what makes people buy or the customers themselves, the people actually acting out the consumption behaviors; the individuals who feel the itch created by an unfulfilled need and spend countless hours seeking out a solution.

Connecting with customers is hard, I get that; but companies should not fool themselves either by thinking that going the easy way of dealing with “market segments”, “psycho-graphic profiles”, targeting customers, and “cardboard cutouts” is equivalent to engaging and connecting with customers . The consequence of this is that consumption becomes abstracted from real human experience, then categorized and finally objectified. The customer becomes a mere data-point in a maze of interconnected databases.

All this misses the fundamental idea that the best customers are also the best innovators because they are the most acutely attuned to the needs that are fulfilled by the various products and services they buy. So why don’t companies make it easy on themselves and simply let the customers tell them what they want? When I say this I don’t mean focus groups either.

I mean co-creation, genuine partnerships between those who consume and those work to produce such that when consumers come up with innovations they are embraced instead of slapped down with cease-and desist letters. They are given the tools, access to resources and the ability to be a part of the process that creates the things that make our lives easier, better and more enjoyable. Think of what might have happened for instance, if RIAA had worked with Napster to create a digital distribution platform for the music industry. Would there still have been an Itunes?

Once you objectify your customers, you’ve completely lost touch and it’s only a matter of time before they find someone who makes them feel like they matter. It’s high time companies learned to embrace their customers and profit from Customer Affection.

Then it came to me. Themed booster seats! You could tie it to your restaurant’s theme, or go generic with an assortment of different available booster seats. Some of the ones we came up with included:

• Jet Pilot Booster Seat, complete with yoke and seatbelt.
• Firetruck Booster Seat
• Police Car Booster Seat
• Spaceship, Tractor, and Racecar, and my favourite,
• the Garbage Truck Booster Seat*

What kid wouldn’t love to eat their “dippy eggs” and “toast soldiers” in the cockpit of a fighter jet, or the front seat of a police car?

If you’re focusing on the little things to enhance your overall experience, don’t forget the the experience of the little ones’ well.

As an aside, if you do get the chance to grab breakfast at one of the many Chez Cora’s restaurants across Canada (and soon in the US), its definitely worth it. The fresh-themed menu is delicious and the food presentation is fantastic. You even get a fresh piece of fudge on the way out. Who doesn’t love fudge?!

*this is for anyone who ever wanted to be a garbage truck driver when they were a kid. There must be a mystical quality about the garbage truck driver, as a surprising number of people I talked to can remember wanting to be a “garbage man” when they grew up.

“Gallup polls indicate that 300 billion is lost in productivity as 25% of a typical organization is disengaged, 50% is ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change. This lack of engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of strategies that are developed don’t get executed.”

An interesting stat in and of itself, but what happens if we think of this not in terms of productivity within an organization, but rather, from the perspective of a company and its customers:

“…$300 billion is lost in revenue as 25% of a typical organization’s customers are disengaged (buy the product service, but are not satisfied with the level of service or quality), 50% are ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change (excited about your company/product, and tell their friends). This lack of customer engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of customer service efforts targeted at your customers, don’t succeed.”

Now the numbers in my scenario are completely made up, but if that were the reality – and certainly, it could be in a crowdsourced model where your customers are your employees; what would you need to do differently in your customer service strategy?

…And the best thing about getting engaged with your customers, is that it doesn’t cost you 3 months salary!

(photo credit: rmrayner)

After the initial shock, I thought, oh well, I’ll just order a new adapter. More shock. The official G4 iBook AC adapter is $100 at the Apple Store.

For something that is known to be so poorly designed, (the new adapters are purportedly much better), you can imagine my surprise at the price of a simple AC adapter. I know it comes with that Apple je ne ses quoi, but surely that can’t be worth a $100???

Given the options: expensive white paper weight or working iBook, I ended up purchasing the adapter but I wasn’t happy about it. I felt seduced and used by Apple.

I bought into the Apple mythology of dream like user experience and ease of use whole-heartedly only to have my affections spurned. Apple needs to make the experience of having a broken AC adapter and loss of access to the files on the device much less traumatic and painful. As is it really affects my perception of the brand because it makes me think that Apple is only great until something goes wrong at which point they couldn’t care less about your experience. By lowering the price to match customer expectations Apple would extend the goodwill generated by the promise and the experience of their product.

In the short term, sure, it will cost them more, but in the long term, people will buy more Apple products because they know that should things go wrong, Apple will be there with a palatable solution. People might even buy a second adapter in case of such an emergency.

1. Do a two minute check.
   Shortly after you’ve dropped off your table’s food and drinks, stop by and make sure everyone’s meal is okay. Anything longer than two minutes, and if there’s something wrong with their meal, they’ll be flagging you down shortly.
2. Assume that I’m thirsty.
   With our bodies being made up of roughly 70% water, it’s safe to assume that I’m probably thirsty. Always bring water with you as you pass by and do a quick check to make sure everyone’s topped up. If you’re working somewhere that has unlimited refills of pop/juice, bring along another refill before they ask you to. Mind readers get good tips.
3. Be genuine.
   People can tell when you’re faking an overly friendly greeting or smile; lose the act and be genuine. Everyone has their bad days, and if that’s the case, see if you can’t switch shifts with someone and take the day off. Your manager will thank you for it.
4. Be Knowledeable.
   Know your menu, your specials, and your drink list. If you don’t know, I might as well walk to the kitchen myself and call out the order.
5. Don’t be a tip grabber (aka Grabby Gus).
   Now that you’ve followed all of these simple guidelines, don’t go and blow it all at the last step. If the customer leaves a tip, don’t swipe it up off the table in front of them before they leave. Allow them to leave when they’re ready, and retrieve your tip after the fact. I know you’ve earned it, but its rude.

If you can put all these tips to use, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be getting excellent tips and providing an excellent dining experience to your (soon returning) customers.

Do you have other serving tips that make people’s dining experience extra special? What are some of your restaurant experience pet peeves?