Almost everybody thinks that marketing is easy, that just about anybody could be a marketeer if given the chance. People figure that because time watching TV and scrutinizing ads in the subway that this gives them a qualified opinion on the subject. Unfortunately, not everyone can be a marketeer they spend a lot of because having on opinion on marketing isn’t the same as marketing.
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When was the last time you told your mobile service provider that you love them or the maker of your cell phone?

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.

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I was reading up on some of the VizThink 2008 session summaries that people have been blogging about, and there was one bit from Jim Haudan’s Drawing the Big Picture: Strategy Alignment and Deployment Using Visualization session that sort of stuck out at me:

“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)

A few weeks ago I read an article about a rather iconic maker of parkas that I’d never heard of before. The company is called Canada Goose. They’ve made a name for themselves outfitting polar explorers and now produce very durable, warm and fashionable parkas. Naturally, I thought “if these parkas are so great how come I’ve never seen them before???” Read more »

So yesterday was Macworld and Macophiles from all corners of the known universe descended upon San Francisco with cult like devotion to hear High Priest Steve Jobs preach the Gospel of Mac. I listened fairly intently to the keynote and one thing struck me as worth writing about. No it’s not the Mac Book Air or the Apple TV Take 2 or the Time Capsule for that matter. Read more »