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 ne0-0smosian 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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Marketing brand messaging, Customer Support, Inferior Product, Lenovo Laptop, marketing message, Marketing Support, Purchase Decision, Support Forum, Unfortunate Case

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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Marketing charitable, Marketing, promotion

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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Marketing Disruptive Technology, email, Media Tools, Netflix, Proactive Approach, social media tools

Image by AirMe

No such thing as a free lunch?

How about, no such thing as a free link.

Christopher Ross publishes a web design and marketing blog I read and comment on frequently. The blog has a lot of useful content, including tips, how to lists and recommendations for online marketing and site/blog design. In fact, I list it on my blog roll here.

One of the tactics Christopher has used to drive comments on posts is a free page rank 5 link from his site to the top 10 commenters – by number of posts. Interesting idea. Incent visitors to comment – those that comment drive traffic – both his site and his top commenter’s sites’ page ranks go up as a result.

Only one small problem. There was no subjective measure of a post’s worth. And as a result, many virtual spammers (my words, not his) climbed to the top of the top 10 commenter’s list. Comments soon became more about quantity than quality. Those looking to grab a spot in the top 10 barraged the blog with short comments that best case had little to do with the post, and worst case were completely devoid of any type of thought about the topic at hand.

So Christopher made the tough call of taking down the backlink incentive.

The reaction – entitlement.

For some reason, people had come to believe they were entitled to the links – regardless of the quality of their contribution.

As a frequent contributor, but someone who never scratched the top 10 list, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. After all, a comment that actually contributed to the topic of the post was less valuable under the old system than a quick and dirty comment posted to get into the top 10. The assumption being that more comments were better than quality comments.

So I wasn’t really that surprised when the practice was dropped.

The same cannot be said for many of the other visitors to the site. Christopher actually chose to address the issue in a post following a number of emails and posts from commenters who felt they had a right to their links. They had grown accustomed to getting the links, regardless of their contributions to the blog community.

In other words – they felt entitled.

To me, entitlement is lazy. It fosters a belief that no matter what happens, you deserve whatever benefit, right or privilege you currently have (or think you should have).

In business, entitlement is deadly. And from a marketers perspective, will almost certainly lead to the loss of sales, clients or your business.

So how do you fight the entitlement urge?

Constantly deliver value. Whether it be new and better products or services, impeccable customer service, or relevant and valuable web content, the idea that you have to earn your clients and their continued business every day is a hallmark of a successful and enduring company.

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Links, Marketing, SEO content, customer relationships, linking strategy, links, Online marketing

Walk through your local grocery store’s produce section and one thing is clear – organic sells. In the last decade or so, the term organic has come to stand for products that are free of hormones, additives or preservatives that have in the past, made our food look better, grow bigger, or last longer.

image by Secret Tenerife

In short, organic is natural.

So why the move away from seemingly beneficial, man-made science?

The answer is perception. There is a perception that organic is necessarily better for you because it lacks unnatural influences.

I caught a Hubspot webinar this week that touched on the pros of organic. Of course, we’re talking about search at this point, not apples and oranges.

The subject of the webinar was managing a move away from Google PPC (pay per click) campaigns in favor of an organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. Organic, in the case of SEO, refers to the results that are listed on the left hand side of the search results pages (SRP) as opposed to those PPC results on the right.

The basic gist of the webinar was that organic results are, simply put, better than PPC results. To be fair, I imagine Hubspot would claim the timeframe makes a difference here – organic results requiring in almost all cases a longer term to show results.

But I think the idea of one type of traffic as better than the other is an oversimplification. And here’s why.

There is a perception that organic results are free. Once again, as with food, perception colors the organic discussion.

Organic search is anything but free. In fact, I would argue that organic results are often more expensive, at least in the short term, than are PPC results.

Organic results require Google to recognize your site, and more accurately your site content, as extremely relevant to your desired search terms (or keywords). What has to happen for this to occur? A lot of things.

First, you’re going to need relevant, targeted and keyword-rich content. Then you’re going to need highly ranked sites to link to yours. Next, you need to make sure you are putting out new content, still as relevant as the existing content, very frequently. And don’t forget about your on-page optimization.

So is it hopeless? Should you quit your organic efforts before you start? Not at all. These are important pieces to your overall SEO strategy. But recognize that organic is not free. And while it uses the term organic, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily better than PPC campaigns at driving prospective customers to your site.

Instead, let’s look at PPC and organic SEO on a continuum. Some business objectives favor organic results, some favor PPC. But almost all can benefit from the right mix of the two. In other words, no need to cancel your Google account.

But what do we know about the differences between the two tactics?

Well, we know that for your organic rankings to pay off, you’re going to need to make a commitment, over time, to a substantial amount of work. For most businesses, that means dedicating an internal resource to managing your web efforts. And depending on the size of your company and your online goals, this can be a full-time job.

Not sounding so inexpensive, dare I say “organic,” any more.

PPC campaigns on the other hand, are less time intensive, but have a measurable price tag attached. That price tag, while ranging in relative cost from inexpensive to expensive depending on your industry, is very manageable. You control, to a great degree, how much you spend. And, as a result, you control how much traffic Google sends to your site. The trade-off is the time and effort of an internal resource for an added expense.

So on one hand we have organic results taking a long-term, dedicated effort by an internal person or persons. On the other, we have a fast and eminently manageable expense that drives traffic to your site right now. The key to a successful strategy is leveraging both in varying degrees.

And as such, I would argue that both should play an ongoing role in most companies’ online marketing efforts.

While both organic and PPC can be effective, know what you’re in for if you choose to focus exclusively on the former. There’s no free lunch after all… not even if it’s organic.

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Marketing, New Marketing, SEO digital marketing, New Marketing, new media strategy, Online marketing, optimize websites, organic search, PPC