HFTB Marketing Blog

As much as I’d like to simply rant about my latest laptop buying experience, that’s not the ultimate purpose of this post. And although I was greeted at every turn by customer support personnel more inept than the last, eventually leading me to simply accept my fate and keep their inferior product, that’s not the point of this article.

I purchased a Lenovo laptop as a gift for a family member. It happened that this was a value-based purchase decision, as my relative didn’t really need the latest and greatest. I decided on the Lenovo as their deal for the specs offered was the best at the time. Little did I know that 12 hours of mind-numbing “support” later, I would be left with the same malfunctioning laptop.

One thing I noticed from my hours of phone time, other than how much one can come to loath specific Christmas carols, was that customer support plays an absolutely crucial role in any marketing effort. Your support personnel are a direct reflection of the overall company attitude towards delivering value to its customers. The job of marketing is to communicate that value – why one product is superior to the others available in the marketplace.

In my unfortunate case, I unpacked a Lenovo Y550 only to realize the network card wasn’t working properly. I looked into the issue on Lenovo’s support forum where I learned that this wasn’t an isolated problem. What I didn’t see was an outpouring of support from the forum’s Lenovo moderators.

Wouldn’t an online support forum on your own site be a perfect place to engage and put to rest any recurring technical issues? Isn’t that the idea of a support forum (other than keeping customers off your more costly phone support system).

But undeterred by the lack of support on the forum, I pressed on; this time, via phone. I want to be fair here, so I’m going to list the number of minutes spent prior to talking to a human as precisely as possible.

First call – 37 minutes on hold (Christmas music sounded great for most of this call – but alas, I had to hang up before I talked to anyone)

Second call – 22 minutes (Christmas music wore a little thin, but I was rejuvenated by an actual person picking up the call)

At this point, the details of my runaround become less important than the support system and inadvertent messaging by the Lenovo “support staff,” and I use that term loosely.

Suffice it to say, I have been told contradicting information by four (4) separate Lenovo support representatives, including a support manager at one point. Asking me to call various phone lines, dropped calls and a general lack of sincerity to fix the actual issue characterized all but one experience with support staff.

So how does the experience tie into the marketing message I got from Lenovo? Here’s what came through loud and clear, although inadvertently, I’m sure, from my interaction with the company.

1.) They want you to buy their products

2.) They want you to keep their products

3.) It’s not of vital importance to the company that the product you order,.. works

4.) Once you order a product and you unpack it, working or not, it’s yours (as an interesting aside, if you don’t unpack the product, but can tell that it isn’t working through some neo-osmosian brain scan procedure, you can return it free of charge)

5.) If you want to return a product that isn’t working, assuming you aren’t Karnak and know the computer doesn’t work before opening the box, you get to pay for the privilege (15% + applicable shipping)

6.) Support is a relative term and is administered according to what makes sense for the company, not the consumer

The marketing lesson here is simple. Your brand messaging doesn’t stop when the sale is made. Lenovo had a perfect opportunity to convert me to a repeat customer through thorough and value-based customer support. That,.. is marketing. It’s letting your customers, who have taken a chance with a new company, know that you stand behind the marketing message you put out there prior to a purchase decision.

Lenovo failed miserably in this regard.

For the record, I have direct experience with other companies. I never like to hit all negatives in a post without coming back to some positive experiences.

I have purchased a number of Dell products and have always received exemplary customer support. Of course, I have never unpacked a Dell product and not had it work either. But the point is, my next purchase will be a Dell, even if the price point is at a premium to the comparable Lenovo system. And this is a direct result of customer support as a marketing tactic.

Every time you touch a customer, you’re broadcasting a marketing message. Some companies understand this and use it to their advantage… some don’t. Sadly, Lenovo and their lackluster support network seem less interested in the marketing message delivered after a purchase decision, than the message used to entice it.

Image by theogeo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

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Launching a product through charitable contributions… yours, that is

I love Starbucks. I spend a considerable amount of time in Starbucks and I really like their products, people and company. But with their new Via instant coffee launch, my local Starbucks have been using a product launch strategy that I find a little hard to swallow.

Bad pun aside, Starbucks has placed a large donation box in many of their Southern California locations. With the recent California wildfires, the donations go to the brave men and women of the local fire departments.

A noble cause. I’m all for supporting our firefighters. I had friends and family directly affected by the fires, and needless to say, without these unbelievably brave individuals, many of them would have seen their homes go up in flames.

My problem is with the way Starbucks is “donating” to the firefighters.

As far as I can tell through conversations with a number of Starbucks employees, both Baristas and Managers, Starbucks doesn’t actually “donate” anything. Instead, they ask their customers to make a donation to the firefighters by purchasing one of a couple different Via products and putting it in the donation box (clearly marked and located right next to the registers). This seems a little odd to me.

Starbucks has created a donation program around a new product launch. But the company doesn’t actually donate anything. They ask their customers to make an incremental purchase and then donate it. Just so happens that the incremental purchase is of a product line that Starbucks is investing significant resources in publicizing.

The campaign seems extremely disingenuous to me. As someone who has donated to the Via program, I resent being asked to contribute to a cause Starbucks isn’t really contributing to itself and that looks to be focused on driving new product sales and awareness by creating a charitable giving image.

What might make more sense is if Starbucks matched the Via donations with either a cash contribution to the fire departments, or at least a matching gift of one of their products; Via or other coffee.

I have no problem if Starbucks has some skin in the game. But to ask your customers to buy your new product and donate it seems more than a little self-serving.

If you would like to support the firefighters, click over to the Los Angeles Firemen’s Relief Association. The association supports the families of firemen injured or killed in the line of duty. Straight donation… nothing to buy here.

If anyone has a different take on the promotion or some information about Starbucks contributions, if there are any, please comment and let me know. I’m more than willing to say I’m wrong if there is an aspect to the campaign I’m missing.

Image by rudolph schuba courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

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Are you optimizing crap? And if so, how optimal do you expect crap can get?

David Meerman Scott points out that search engine optimization (SEO) without good website content is like optimizing crap. In his recent post, “Visualizing Crap,” David goes on to show an interesting visual created by Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing Blog of the crap creation process. I’m including it below.

What’s interesting to me about the idea of optimizing a site that doesn’t provide stellar or exceptional content is that the practice is so prevalent.

So what accounts for the need for optimal crap?

For one thing, it’s easier to optimize a shoddy existing site than it is to go back, take a hard look and sink the money into developing great content and revising the existing site (or starting from scratch). It’s easier to bring in an SEO expert/firm and pay him/her/them to wave their magic wands and… voila, your crap is more findable. Congratulations.

I would make the case, and often do to those that at least are polite enough to feign interest, that SCO should preempt SEO.

What’s SCO?

Site Content Optimization (SCO). Not only does SCO come before SEO from an alphabetical perspective, it is also frankly, more important.

This is the point at which the SEO geeks stand up and throw out the “if you’re not indexable it doesn’t matter how good your content is,” excuse the term… crap.

This is partially true. But the interesting thing about good content is that it tends to get found. And assuming that a business has had some success selling its products or services to some market, there is a good chance that their content, if compellingly SCOed, will reach that market. That’s the beauty of the Internet; Google does a pretty good job of sniffing out the relevant content.

So in honor of all those that have ramped up the crap assembly line as so ably illustrated by Mark Smiciklas and further distributed by David Meerman Scott, let’s start hyping SCO – at least as a precursor to SEO.

Funny thing is, if you give SCO an honest go, you’re half way there with your SEO anyway.

After all, the world could use less crap… particularly the findable sort. Personally, I prefer my crap unfound.

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I got an email yesterday from Netflix. They don’t typically barrage me with meaningless, salesy emails… so I opened it.

It was an apology. My first thought was: “An apology for what? I really enjoy Netflix and their new streaming service is awesome.” It is, by the way, awesome.

The apology turned out to be for a problem I might have experienced watching their instant streaming service over my Xbox 360. That’s right – might. They were proactively apologizing for something that I didn’t even have a problem with.

Here’s a screenshot of the actual email.

Now, the traditional wisdom on a situation like this might have been to wait for the complaints to come in and then respond to them in turn. After all, they wouldn’t want to alert subscribers like me that didn’t experience a problem that there might be something wrong with the service. Silly, isn’t it.

But I’ve heard thinking like this time after time from companies. The old, “let them come to us and don’t cause a problem in the meantime” strategy. Problem is, waiting for your customers to come to you with a problem isn’t good enough. And with the wealth of social media tools available to businesses today, there really isn’t any excuse for doing so.

The great thing about the Netflix approach is that they turned a negative into a real positive – even for subscribers like me that didn’t experience a problem in the first place.

To contrast this approach, take a look at Blockbuster. The purpose of this post is not to slam Blockbuster. We were subscribers for years. But the experiences have been so different to this point, I think it’s worth relating.

Blockbuster had a great program that allowed subscribers a certain number of titles at one time on a monthly basis… same as Netflix. However, Blockbuster’s differentiator was key for us. They allowed two in-store movie swaps per month. So not only could you get movies through the mail, you could also get instantly gratified in-store if you just had to check out the new Ben Affleck flick (unlikely, I know… but stay with me).

Problem was, Blockbuster canceled the in-store swaps. Okay, I get it… probably too expensive. My issue wasn’t with Blockbuster canceling the feature. It was the manner in which they did it. I might have received an email – not sure if I did or not. Blockbuster sends quite a few emails on a monthly basis typically with little relevant content. This equals a low clickthrough in my experience. I probably didn’t open it if I got it in the first place.

The way we found out that our subscription had been downgraded (features downgraded… not price, by the way, that cunningly stayed the same) was when the store clerk told me I could no longer swap the movie out as in the past. And that was the extent of the explanation. Evidently Blockbuster in store has no exposure to the Blockbuster Online account information.

So what’s the moral of the story? Simply put: Communicate with your customers. Good, bad or indifferent, just let them know what’s going on. Good businesses don’t need to hide behind customer service departments. They can preempt customer service calls by being straightforward and offering mea culpas when they make sense.

As a subscriber, I feel better about Netflix today than I did yesterday. Primarily because they screwed up!

What do you think about companies that take a proactive stance toward customer service issues? Have you had similar experiences, either positive or negative?

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It'll make sense by the end of the post

Now that we’ve seen where to start with keyword research and that crazy, some may even say zany, Latent Semantic Indexing stuff, let’s take a look at one great way to use some of those keywords.

A Rose By Any Other Name…

Titles matter… they just do. I’m not talking about your Uncle Rico who insists on referring to everyone as “chief” or “boss.” No, the titles we’re talking about are a little less smarmy.

We’ll concern ourselves with page titles… web page titles in fact. A title is the little phrase that comes up in the upper left-hand corner of your browser window when you land on a web page. Take a look at the example below.

So what’s the big deal about titles?

Imagine walking into your next mixer, networking event, or other non-descript glad-handing session, and instead of filling out your name tag with your God given name, you simply leave it blank. When I see this, my first inclination is to fill in the blank with a host of colorful monikers – some of which might be accurate, some not so much.

Indeed, we all need a title. And while your name might not tell others what you are about, the title tags on your site pages do.

With this in mind, how should you choose those all important title tags? Glad you asked.

Remember the keyword research you did in tip #1. Shameless deep-linking opportunities aside, revisit your keywords on each page and select the keyword or keyword phrase that really describes the page content best. That’s your title.

Each page title should be different according to the content on the page. According to those who presumably know this stuff, optimal title length is about 65 characters including spaces. Primarily, this is so your title will fit in the limited space it has in the upper left hand corner of your browser window.

Also, don’t bother with stop words.  What are stop words?  The common little words that join parts of speech but add little (guess that depends on the context, but go with me on this one).  So you can leave out words like “the, to, and, from.”  They don’t add anything in this case and Google just ignores them. You want to use all of your 65 characters to add search value to your title.

How do you add a page title?

Couple of ways. If you’re using a WYSIWYG editor, there should be a menu option to add the HTML code to your page. Dreamweaver makes this really easy with a “title” field right in the user interface.

If you want to add the code yourself, no problem. Just cut and paste the following between the <head> </head> tags.

<title>Page title goes here</title>

Seems like an insignificant little tactic, but it can be extremely powerful in telling Google what your site pages are really about.

Here’s the Camaro part

One warning. As with keywords, just because you tell Google your page is about a certain topic, doesn’t mean Google believes you. You have to have the content to prove that your page supports that page title or keyword.

So if your site is about cars, and you use your keyword ninja skills to deduce that the top car keyword search term is “bitchen Camaro,” but not only is your Camaro really not all that bitchen, but you don’t even have a Camaro, bitchen or not, on your page… you might want to reconsider titling the page “Bitchen Camaro.”

Instead, think about using a term that actually appears on the page fairly frequently (aka, keyword density). Maybe “crappy Firebird” or “explosive Pinto” or “must-have-a-bad-mustache-to-drive-Corvette.” You get the idea.


Image by dave_7 courtesy of flickr Creative Commons

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