Search Results: one of the few
Sorry: Easy To Say, Not So Easy To Do
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The assistant serving at the counter apologised for the long wait, then for not having received the order and finally for having no change. The cycle continued with every customer she served. There was a sorry for the wrong order given and one for the fact that the croissants hadn’t arrived that morning. And with each one her shoulders drooped a little more, along with the smile she tried to wear. Her job was to be the face of a million dollar small business and it was obviously no fun.
It’s become easier than ever to say sorry now that we can do it in public.
An email fired off in seconds. A 140 character public contrition on Twitter and you’re done.
“We’re sorry. We try, we don’t always get it right.”
Businesses have teams of people who can respond to complaints and fewer who are held accountable for fixing things. Sorry in isolation does not constitute an apology. Every apology has two parts. The admission that something went wrong, followed by the action taken that will mean it doesn’t happen again.
So when the Telco apologises for interrupting customers at the weekend. The apology must be more than an admission. Part two involves changing something so that it doesn’t happen again.
When the airline cancels flights, says sorry, then tells passengers to rebook themselves on the next available, the refund shouldn’t take fifteen uncertain business days to process.
When you or your staff start and end the day by apologising to every single customer it’s time to look at what isn’t working and to fix it. We need to understand why people were unhappy, where we went wrong and then to follow through, showing them that we’re sorry by doing better next time.
A sorry doesn’t help or excuse your business unless you back it up. Being sorry means doing something to make things better. Saying sorry should mean that you care enough to do that.
Your brand story is always less about what you say and more about what you do.
Image by Marc Thiele.
Valuable Things We Ignore In The Quest For Growth
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
One of the first words a baby learns to say is ‘more’. They learn very early on that this one word is the shortest route to getting what they want. Every three year old knows that two cupcakes are better than one.
It’s no surprise then that this lesson stays with us through life and that we take it into our businesses. We condition ourselves to believe that more followers, more leads and more customers are the key to success.
Growth doesn’t necessarily mean you are growing. If you attract the wrong customers, increase profits at the expense of staff morale, cannot deliver on your promises or create the impact that you’d hoped, are you any further ahead? So when you target growth it pays to think hard about the metric of more and consider a more holistic definition.
Could the best growth strategy for your business be to make the biggest difference to fewer people?
Image by Jessica Lucia.
Showing Up For Humans, Not Just For Google
I want to send some flowers to a friend a few suburbs away, of course I could deliver them myself, but there is something magical about the unexpected arrival of flowers that means I want to have them delivered. And so I turn to Google.
After 20 minutes I find myself on page ten feeling like I have viewed 56,000 of the 57,000 results. Who gets to page ten without finding what they are looking for? I never get to page ten! But all of the florists are the same—at least that’s how they look and sound on Google—see. The formulaic bouquets look like they were assembled in a factory to spec. The frustrating thing is that I know every florist is not the same and I’m trying to find the one that’s had the courage to say we’re not like everyone else.
I want to believe that someone who cared got up before dawn, so he could reach the flower market in time to get his pick of the best blooms on sale today. I imagine him back in his workroom carefully trimming each stem and examining each petal. I conjure up an image of how he assembles every bouquet, choosing each flower on purpose so that no two bunches look alike. And it matters that he cares enough to know that he’s not just delivering flowers today, but that he’s enabling connections between friends or soothing quarrels between lovers.
Whatever you sell or serve if you go to the trouble and expense to be found then don’t make yourself invisible to the person who matters.
Image by Robin Giese.
Who Is Responsible For Seeing Your Customers?
When I worked in the stock control department at Tesco thirty years ago, I was partly responsible for making sure there were enough tins of soup available to be bought by the customers who would walk up and down those supermarket aisles the following week. There were people in charge of making sure that shelves were full and others to process customers efficiently through checkouts. There was a girl who manned the customer service counter. Her job it seemed was to offer practiced and polite responses to disgruntled customers along with their refunds.
Later, when I managed a cafe the boss told me that I was responsible for opening the door at 7am, for making sure that we had enough staff on duty and that the till wasn’t short at the end of the day. There was a girl in charge of buttering bread and cutting up lemon meringue pies into exactly twelve slices and someone to take pound notes from customers for the afternoon tea and cake special during that dead period after 3pm.
Customers came, were served, spent and went. In both businesses there were metrics for efficiency—boxes to be ticked that had implications on balance sheets. If the store didn’t run out of tins of Campbell’s tomato soup, the register balanced and sales trended up, apparently you won.
But there were no metrics around the most important job of all—that of seeing the customer.
Nobody at Tesco was obliged to care about the old lady who couldn’t reach the tins on the high shelf. We were not supposed to notice how she did a mental calculation of the contents of her basket before she got to the checkout to save being embarrassed if she was short by a few pence.
And as long as the twelve pieces of pie at the cafe were sold by closing time it didn’t matter who had bought and paid for them. Never mind that each piece represented a student at the university across the road eking out his grant on the afternoon special, or a young mother sheltering from a downpour with her crying baby.
When we offer service, by definition the minimum requirement is that we are useful to people. But how can we truly serve people if we don’t know who they are? How can we give them what they want if we don’t make the effort to see them?
The businesses that have been runaway successes over the past three decades (since I gave up counting tins for Tesco), are the ones that have taken the time to really see their customers and then to design metrics around serving them based on what they see. The Zappos, Apples (from Geniuses to engineers) and Patagonias of this world make someone responsible for seeing, not just serving their customers. Who is responsible for seeing yours?
Image by John Haslam.
The Truth About Vanilla
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Almost one in five people who order an ice cream in the U.S. today will order vanilla.
Vanilla then is an easy flavour to make because we know that most people won’t have an objection to it and 17% of people are likely to order it.
It feels more risky to be the company that doesn’t offer vanilla—which is why so few choose to be that company.
With more people lining up to choose vanilla, it’s tempting to think that being in the vanilla business is the safe bet. But there will always be more vanilla makers, competing for those vanilla eaters, so it’s much harder for one vanilla in particular to stand out.
Vanilla might be predictable, but it doesn’t make for lines down the street, or fan photos on Instagram. Vanilla appeases but it doesn’t delight. Vanilla doesn’t get talked about.
The brand story you choose to tell dictates the kind of customers you will attract and what you can charge them. It changes your posture as a business owner and ultimately dictates the difference your business will make. It turns out that doing the obvious isn’t always the shortcut to success.
And red bean flavour might be less risky than you think.
Image by Andreas Kollmorgen.
Play To Your Strengths
If you look hard enough at what’s going right (and sometimes wrong) in a business there are always lessons to be learned. Take the story of Tom the decorator who built a great business over many years, then suddenly seemed to lose his way. Part two of that story explains why Tom succeeded in the first place and why things have gone awry of late.
While Tom apprenticed as a decorator and knows a lot about colours and paint finishes and surface preparation, he actually doesn’t enjoy the solitary work of painting. Tom is a people person and a terrific salesman. He has a confident, firm handshake, knows how to look people in the eye and has their trust within minutes of meeting. Tom is also a brilliant organiser and manager. He knows how to hire the right man for the job and can give him very clear instructions. Tom has a way of making his team aware of the standard he expects and he commands their respect.
Tom is so good at selling that he has scaled his business rapidly and taken on more staff to do the work he doesn’t enjoy so much (although he never acknowledges this). Tom’s circumstances have changed lately. His cash flow is not what it was because he has just returned from a recent year-long overseas trip, so he’s not hiring a team to help with the jobs he gets during these first few lean months while he builds up his reserves of cash. But Tom is doing his business more harm than good. He is making a short term tactical decision and has abandoned the strategy that has served him so well in the past. Now he’s begun to take shortcuts, to look for quick wins and most important of all he’s stopped playing to his strengths.
Tom’s gift was never that he applied paint better than any other decorator in town. His gift was always that he knew how to make people feel like they mattered. He just didn’t realise that’s what he did for a living.
The irony is that while we spend time on our business goals, working hard to hit targets we set; sometimes we can’t explain how we did it, why it worked or how we really contributed to making it all happen. It’s never been more important to take time to work out who you are and why that matters to your business.
Image by Chris Beckett.
What’s More Important Than Building Awareness?
Ask any business owner what their most pressing problem is and ‘building awareness’ is sure to be on the list. Maybe it’s on your list too? In a world where it’s harder to get attention, gaining mind share is a priority for everyone.
We think that if we can just get a few more people to know about us that we’ll be all set.
I often tell the story of the two side-by-side cafes in our neighbourhood. On days when there is a line of twenty people waiting for either a table or a takeaway coffee at one, the other is virtually empty. We all know the empty cafe is there, we can’t miss it…and yet nothing changes. It’s not that the owners don’t care, it’s that all of their energy is focused on tactics that get people to notice.
Perhaps the bigger questions for them to consider (and maybe us too), before building awareness with more signs and new menus is—why will one person care that we’re here in the first place? What are we doing that’s going to compel that person to tell two friends and then come back tomorrow?
What’s more important than building awareness is what you plan to do with it once you’ve got it, because top of mind is not the same thing at all as close to heart.
Image by Patrick Gage Kelley.
The Real Reason The Microsoft Store Is Empty
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Clues about what matters to people and how their emotions drive their choices are all around us and there’s no better time to see evidence of this in action than during the festive season.
Slate recently posted two images that tell two very different brand stories. Both photos were taken on what should have been a busy Sunday afternoon during the peak-shopping season. One shows an empty Microsoft Store, the other a packed Apple Store.
No big surprise there you might say. Everyone knows that people use Microsoft products, but few are in love with the brand. Contrast that with how people feel about Apple products. We know that when Steve Jobs and his design team were working on the iPhone he charged them with designing the first phone people would fall in love with, but innovation and marketing at Apple goes one step beyond that. While Microsoft have been building utilitarian products for years, Apple has been creating products that people not only love, but the kind of products that help people to fall just a little bit more in love with themselves.
Businesses that have thrived in a Business 3.0 world have succeeded at some level in helping people to feel better about themselves.
The same opportunity is open to you…..and Microsoft.
Image by Joe Wilcox.
Doing Work That Matters
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
My maternal grandfather died in his sleep, while my mother aged just four, lay breathing next to him. She was number ten of eleven children. Ten years later mum was sent to work at a biscuit factory. She hated it from day one. At the end of that first shift she told her mother that she was never going back. She worked there every day for the next four years, until she finally escaped aged eighteen.
My paternal grandmother died in childbirth aged just 36, while her husband who was a baker stayed at home looking after their other ten children. My dad’s first job was as a delivery boy for the local grocer. They gave him a bike and a few shillings at the end of the week, but not enough for shoes.
My parents met at the crisp factory, where they both worked long days frying potatoes in front of huge vats of hot oil. They had worked in other factories before that, packing biscuits or dipping caramels in icing, either pink or white. Work to them was the thing you tolerated because you had no choice. If you were lucky it bought you a couple of cinema tickets and a few hours escape on a Saturday evening.
I remember my dad going to work every day in the vast freezers at the HB factory to fill orders of Cornettos and load boxes of Birdseye ready meals, so that Captain Birdseye could put chunky flakes of sea fresh cod on more plates across the county.
He worked so that we could go to school with food in our bellies (a luxury he never had). So that he could buy a whole set of Encyclopedia Britannica by the week, in the hope of something better for us. So that we would have a nice yard of new green ribbon to wear in our hair on Sunday.
So that we would never want for a new pair of Clarke’s shoes.
My dad got joy from what the work enabled him to do when he wasn’t at work. From the hope of a better future that his ability to bring home a pay packet at the end of each week might bring his children. Work was a means to the promise of a better end. There was little joy or fulfilment in the work itself.
Every single person who is reading this has a choice that isn’t this. We get to care that our work has meaning, that our days are not just something we get through. Let’s not waste it for a second.
Image by Thomas Hawk.
March 12, 2014
Blog Comments: Strategy Or Tactic?
filed in Strategy
When people began blogging over a decade ago blog comments were a real way to engage or add to the discussion. Today the amount of content we can access online has exploded and how we consume that content on the go via mobile devices has changed things. The truth is that a tiny percentage of readers ever leave a comment and some of the most popular single author blogs in the world like Zen Habits don’t have comments at all.
Here are a few things I’ve noticed about blog comments
The number of comments is seen as social proof, or as a way to judge the worthiness of a post.
We assume that if a post is good it will have lots of comments. But a post that might resonate with you may not appeal to someone who likes to comment. Many of the most shared posts on this blog have no comments. I noticed that this bothered my loyal readers who felt the need to comment just to say thanks for writing an article that helped them.
Many blog posts are engineered to invite comments.
Often blog posts end with a question. Sometimes that question adds value, but more often it’s used as a tactic to get more comments.
Older blogs have built communities through comments.
Established blogs became places where readers recongised and connected with the ideas of other readers through comments. That’s getting harder to do these days.
Readers use comments to acknowledge and connect with the writer.
That can be a good thing, but there are better ways for you and I to meaningfully connect.
Readers use comments to show their gratitude.
I love the intention behind that—but there are limits to how many times someone can say, ‘thanks for writing this post, here’s how it helped me.’ in the comments.
I don’t want people to dismiss a post that might be useful to them because it has no comments. I want to empower readers to decide what’s relevant to them. I’m not sure that comments are the best way to make either better writers, or more informed and inspired readers.
I want to spend time writing for you and not trying to massage the end of each post with a question that’s designed to make you comment so that I can show the world that a gazillion people read it. I am happy if each post helps a handful of people to go out there and bring ideas that create difference to the world.
If I am going to build a community around these ideas I believe I need to do that with intention and right now comments are not helping me to do that.
I don’t want you to comment because you feel like you should, or because you feel like you need to pay me back in comments. You’ve already paid with your time, attention and trust. I don’t take any of that for granted for a second.
If you ever want to reach out to me to say anything—even if it’s thanks, you can contact me any time, as many readers do by hitting reply when posts are emailed to you or by email.
So, that’s my very long winded way of explaining why I’ve decided to switch off comments here for now to see how we go. This is not to say that comments won’t work brilliantly for you and your blog.
Today might be the end of comments, but it’s definitely not the end of the conversation.
Image by Eddie Codel.