Do The Right Thing

There’s a pretty interesting article in February 16th The New York Times Magazine, called “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” If you use a credit card or a loyalty program at your favorite store, they know a lot about you and your purchasing habits.

Perhaps you shop at your local co-op. You go in, maybe you pay with a credit card, maybe with cash, but if you are a member, you give them your member number. That membership number is used to authorize the membership discount, but it also gives them the ability to track everything you purchase. They know what kind of coffee you tend to buy, how many fresh veggies or microwaveable organic chicken nuggets you bought last week. Whether they use this data may be a different matter…some might, some might not, but the data is there.

Now take a large retailer like Target. If you shop there regularly, what do you think they know about you? With their large organization, IT and marketing resources, how might they use this information? The NYT Magazine article goes into this at depth, but there is a particularly interesting case study on page 7.

[A] man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

While this is an amazing validation of the accuracy of Target’s statistical model, it is also an astounding example of lack of insight into customer experience. Target wisely changed its practices regarding this issue but this should be a cautionary tale to companies that collect customer data. Understanding customers is a good thing and customer data can be used to create relevant experiences, but data is just a tool. It should be used to carefully.

When companies strive to create relationships with customers, we don’t want them to be creepy relationships. “Good afternoon sir and thanks for doing business with Target. According to our statistical models and your high-school daughter’s buying habits, there is a 72% chance she is pregnant…how about a coupon for diapers?” …even if Target were 100% sure, this might be one they may want to keep to themselves.

What's Better than Understanding a Customer?

I just published a new post on Sight Marketing's blog "Market Like You Mean It." It's about the the how understanding the customer experience can help companies create better, more relevant experiences. Technology today allows us to create data-driven, highly measurable experiences for customers. In turn, we can use this information to paint a picture of our customers, even if we have never met them. The purpose? Quit bothering people with stuff they don't care about. Start an intelligent dialogue with them about the things they do.

Here is a little snippet:

"But there's something that beats understanding a customer…understanding two customers from the same organization…or three…or more."

For the rest of the post, please follow this link: What's Better than Understanding a Customer

Social Media vs. Social Activism

A friend forwarded a link to a great article by Malcolm Gladwell from the New Yorker titled “Small Change.”

Among other things, it points out the fundamental difference between networks, like social media, and hierarchies found at the core of successful social activism. I encourage everyone interested in social media to read it because it can help us understand how social media can be most effective as well as what some of its weaknesses are.

As an attempt to briefly summarize the pros and cons of social media I’ve constructed this chart. Maybe we can leverage the power of social networking and get your, low risk, feedback on how to represent this better. Please chime in!

Tangent Alert: What Motivates Us?

For one thing great creative and illustration motivates us to pay attention to a message. For more on the subject though, take this video for example. It is one in a series by RSA Animate. This "Ted Talks" style speech is animated with hand drawn white board markers. Not only is the subject really cool, but the visuals make it absolutely memorizing.



With all the slick graphics, it's nice to see something that has an obvious human touch. More and more marketing communications are returning to hand illustration to tell a story. It's effective and it stands out.

Have any examples? Let me know.

Small Words Make a Big Difference

This afternoon, my wife an I were out running errands, and on the way home we decided to drive through Caribou Coffee and treat ourselves. When we pulled up to the window we heard the voice say “Thank you for choosing Caribou. What can I make for you today?” I don’t remember hearing this from a Caribou barista before, but it sure made my wife and I pause. We looked at each other and commented on how nice it was that she chose those particular words. It is a subtle difference from the usual greeting of something like "what can I get for you today?" but it really seems to be designed to specifically evoke a different experience. Let me break it down:

“Thank you for choosing Caribou.”
The first part of that greeting acknowledged that we did indeed make the choice to stop there, out of all the other choices we had. It validated us in a very small yet meaningful way. I think this is important because with Starbucks and all the great independent coffee shops in South Minneapolis, we really have a lot of choices. Plus, if you think about it, coffee is a commodity. Sure there are different varieties and there is free trade, organic and Arabica, but essentially coffee comes from coffee beans which grow in a certain part of the world and are available to numerous buyers and come in subtly different tastes...there is parity in the product offering coffee shop coffee. Furthermore, the price is about the same regardless of the coffee shop you end up at. So on many levels, even coffee shop coffee is a commodity. We made our choice today based on convenience and some affinity for the product, but we often go to small independent coffee shops as well as the chains. We did make a choice and it was nice to have that acknowledged.



“What can I make for you today?”
Much of what makes one coffee different from another are subtle differences in how they are bought, blended, roasted and sold. What gives 5¢ worth of beans a value of $3.00? One justification for the price is the way coffee is blended with other ingredients. I like low-fat mochas. I really like the Mint Condition, which is a signature coffee drink at Caribou. I haven’t experienced anything quite like it at other coffee shops. It’s a mocha made with mint syrup and crumbled Andes mints sprinkled on top. Sometime in the last year they introduced a product enhancement that allows me to choose what kind of chocolate I want in my coffee (white, milk or dark) which allows me to further customize my order. So when the barista asks what she can make for me today I have my own custom answer: Medium (no Tall or Venti) Mint Condition, Skim, No Whip, Dark Chocolate. They really are making a drink I can’t get anywhere else. Even thought it is made with a commodity espresso bean (although I am sure there is marketing copy that talks about how their bean is different…but I don’t care). I’ll pay $3.50 for my special drink. I don’t really need the coffee (nobody does), but I like my drink, made the way I like it. I like how it makes me feel.

The difference between this greeting and "what can I get for you today" is the difference between what Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering calls "make and sell" or the idea that you have a product and you are looking for customers to a "sense and respond" model where the experience is based on understanding customers, acknowledging their uniqueness and and creating a system that is malleable to each person... the actual product, is how you make people feel, not about your product, but about themselves as they interact with your business.

The way Caribou greets me creates a good experience. It is a clue that affirms my choice and says we want to make your drink, just the way you want it. Nice work Caribou!

Movie Industry's Use of Social Media - Follow Up

This week I followed up on an earlier post about the “Hot Tub Time Machine” movie. A quick recap: I was intrigued by an article on Mashable about how the movie industry is using social media to create excitement around new movies so I went to the promotional website on Eventful and signed up for my free tickets. There was a sense of exclusivity because there were only a limited number of seats available. There was also the option to host a party with 10 of your friends.


To pick up from where I left off on the last blog post, here is how the rest of the process unfolded:

1. Two days before the event I was sent a reminder email about the time and date I had signed up for (which was a good thing because I could have easily forgotten about it - see the picture below). The email also reminded me follow the comments of Facebook.
2. I printed out my reminder and brought it to the movie theater.
3. I was ushered past the ticket window and right to theater 10.
4. Many of the seats had little movie posters taped to the back of the chairs and I guess those were reserved for the parties, but a few minutes before the movie was to begin a gentleman said that it would be OK for people to sit in those seats because he didn’t think those people were coming. At that point a number of people sitting in the front rows, moved back to the better seats in the back. I was already sitting in a seat with a poster – I’m such a rebel.
5. There were a few brief few words from the same person who told us we could sit in any seat we wanted, presumably he was from the studio or Eventful, and he included a warning to turn off our cell phones – he said that there would be people in the audience watching with ‘night vision.’ I assume this was a joke.
6. The movie started with no previews. Nice!
7. Once the movie was over, we sat in the darkness until someone in the audience said “I guess we can find our way out in the dark” there were a few chuckles and people all got up and we filed out of the theater in the dark.
8. I overheard one fellow from a group of young guys walking ahead of me “…that was about 10 times better than I thought it would be!” which I was surprised to hear because I felt the movie was clearly aimed at men my age. But maybe the movie was just silly enough to appeal to the younger guys.
9. I have now had a few other emails from Eventful marketing different events to me. 

Now about the movie:

The truth is that the movie had some great moments. It was very much in the recent vein of movies and TV shows aimed at 30-40 something men struggling with middle age and reminiscing about the golden years, in this case 1986. The music was a great, the costume design was embarrassingly accurate, as were the haircuts. There were a lot of jokes about getting old. The body humor was non-stop and there were enough funny points to make up for the C-level script. None of the characters took the movie too seriously, in fact there was a great moment when Craig Robinson’s character, Nick, jumps the improbable conclusion that they had obviously time-warped back to the winter of 1986...he looks straight into the camera and says “It must have been a hot tub time machine…” and paused for the drama and ridiculousness to sink in. If they had let the edit go one more second, I'm almost positive we would have seen Craig Robinson loosing his composure.

The movie featured John Cusack, Rob Corrdry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke, but also included a kind of weirdly incorporated inter-dimensional character played by Chevy Chase. Crispin Glover's one armed, resort bellhop character made a pretty effective reoccurring joke throughout the movie.

The movie was not great by any stretch but it did have some great moments. The experience of being part of the social media preview process was positive. I think the experience design of the process will help to create some positive buzz about the movie and seems like some pretty effective marketing.

If you have been involved in a similar promotion, let me know what your impressions were.

Why Can't Advertising Be Sexy AND Smart?

One of my favorite blogs to haunt is Adliterate. I like the writing style and it often makes me pause. One such recent blog posts is "More sex please, were British" which makes an argument for embracing a certain 'sexiness' (naughty, rogue, fanciful and somewhat not-professional) aspect of the 'profession' of advertising. The post employs an old joke to frame the point:

"...someone asks that his mother is not told that he works in advertising since she thinks that he is the piano player in a brothel."