Category: Brands Worthy of a Weekend

Compassion Core for Fan Brands

Compassion Core for Fan Brands

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compassion

**Image Pier Madonia for the International Red Cross**

One topic that I have written about extensively in this blog is consumer relationships with brands and, in special cases, Brands Worthy of a Weekend (BWOW).  When I started writing about BWOW, it was still a relatively lofty  bar – a brand for which you care so deeply that you would spend a weekend away from your family to connect with other people who feel the same way about this brand, learn more about the “inside” of the business, meet the people who make the magic happen, etc.   With the seismic shift in the blogosphere, however, brand “weekends” have become more and more common, but with a major difference – they are largely designed for influential voices versus passionate fans.   In the mom blogger space in particular, these events are happening in rapid fire succession with some players covering  multiple per month.  While these executions absolutely hold water as communications strategies – at least for the time being – they are no longer about “passion”.  I would argue it is very difficult to be truly passionate about more than a handful of things.

Enter compassion.  I’d never stopped to give compassion much thought, but having begun work on a project that centers on compassion, I am now hyperconscious of it in the world around me and there are a lot of business applications.  While we expect compassion in/from our fellow human beings, we don’t expect companies – with their one-size-fits-all policies and protocols for front line reps – to want or choose to show compassion.    But upon further reflection,  a lot of brand fan creation stories have an act of compassion at their core.  A couple of examples:

  • This weekend, the waitress at Inside Park at St. Barts who came outside (where I was exiled with my toddler-gone-wild) to chat with me, suggest some places where I could entertain him, and take my order on the go made me a fan.
  • My St. John Knit fan creation story is ALL about a VP of Customer Service reading my letter and breaking the rules to help a desperate bride (now customer for life).
  • Every Twitter/online customer redemption listening story – from @comcastcares to the Dell outreach team or non-tech areas like the Vermont Teddy Bear Company reading a complaint I had made about some spam affiliate marketing and correcting the problem (that turned me into a supporter of their sister venture Pajamagram).

The first step in codifying compassion into your business or brand as witnessed above is listening.  You can not understand “the other” or “walk in their shoes” unless you pause to try to understand and consider an issue, opportunity or problem from their point of view.  In the examples above, “listening” took the forms of watching a situation visually, reading a letter from a customer, and blogosphere monitoring respectively (note: great post on active listening from John Bell here).

The second element is trusting those human beings who do represent your brand with the power to act.  Ritz Carlton famously gives front line reps a budget from which they can do whatever they need to do to correct any problems in a customer’s stay and send them away happy.  That not only creates customer evangelists, it proves that the brand trusts the human beings that they have selected to embody the brand.

So, next time something happens that turns you into a positive-WOM machine for a company or a brand, think about the role compassion plays and whether or not you are in turn entrusting your team with the power to pass it along to your own customers.

St. John Knit’s Caviar IS the New Black

St. John Knit’s Caviar IS the New Black

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I received a letter from Marie Gray, CEO of St. John Knit at home this week.

I assumed it would be about the economy.  That’s why we hear from CEO’s these days, right?

It wasn’t.  It was a 5 paragraph letter about a major change in the staple color of the staple fabric of the classic clothing line: the black Santana knit.  For various reasons including the environmental impact of dyes, the fabric color dying process has changed over the years.   Marie Gray writes that she had noticed that recent “black” collections had a bluish cast and had migrated far too close to their navy blue color.  So, they innovated.  They created a new process that would use less water and energy and produce a truer black that will be called “Caviar”.

Why does this matter to loyal customers like me?  In short, your old stuff won’t match the new stuff.  Part of the beauty of the items is that they last forever and you can mix and match items from lines and years.  It is garanimals for grownups.  The letter mentions that all stores and consultants have been armed with swatches of old black, navy, and new caviar for people to compare for themselves and prepare for the changes.  It also reinforces St. John’s commitment to craftsmanship at a time when other brands are focused on discounting which re-reinforces why this is a brand worthy of of a weekend – as well as my loyalty and respect.  While I wont be making any big purchases any time soon, the swatch compare will drive me into the store on my next NYC trip and who knows, maybe caviar will be hard to resist.

Corporate Blogs: Sucking or Progressing?

Corporate Blogs: Sucking or Progressing?

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Sparked by a recent Forrester report that corporate blogs are one of the least trusted forms of media, much has been written on the topic of corp comms in the last few days.  Here’s the chart that launched this dicussion

As this discussion is going on, Rome is burning (economically speaking).  This offers corporate blogs an amazing opportunity to use their platforms for good, not evil, and some art stepping up to the plate in a significant way.

I detailed some examples in a post yesterday to the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog.  Meanwhile, my Ogilvy colleague and blogger extraordinaire was also fanning the flames over at the Influential Marketing Blog.

What do you think?  Is the Forrester-reported suckage real?  Or does the transparent social media treatment of recent unfortunate events change your mind about their value the way it has mine?

The Netflix Prize & Modeling Influence

The Netflix Prize & Modeling Influence

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Last week, the NY Times published a great article about the leaders in the almost 2-year-in contest to create a computer algorithm that improves upon the ability of Netflix’ Cinematch engine to make accurate recommendations of what you’ll like by 10%.   Competition is hot because the prize is a whopping $1million, but the progress of all of the teams seem to be stalled based on an inability to predict how you’ll like a small handful of polarizing indie movies – most notably Napoleon Dynamite.

So, what makes indies so hard to predict?   Influence!   While recommendation engines are built on the assumption that your taste stays the same, our “tastes” are constantly morphing based on the opinions and information we hear from those around us.

“…the reality is that our cultural tastes evolve, and they change in part because we interact with others. You hear your friends gushing about “Mad Men,” so eventually — even though you have never had any particular interest in early-’60s America — you give it a try. Or you go into the video store and run into a particularly charismatic clerk who persuades you that you really, really have to give “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” a chance.”

Not only do your friends’ recommendations encourage trial or purchase, they also change the way you judge or take in the information.  If I already know that someone I respect really loves a film (restaurant, book, whatever), I am walking in with a very positive inclination to also enjoy the experience.  M.I.T professor Pattie Maes, who pioneered one of the first recommendation engines in the early ’90s, believes that these sources of influence are the flaw in the Netflix contest (based solely on movie rating information).  She believes “culture isn’t experienced in solitude. We also consume shows and movies and music as a way of participating in society. That social need can override the question of whether or not we’ll like the movie.”

Our desire for conversational capital and the social connection it can create is indeed capable of overriding, or at least prejudicing, our individual tastes.  Maybe instead of longing for the demogrphic information of the recommenders in the Netflix contest, the golden ticket would indeed be a social graph showing the way various recommenders are connected and the order they have seen the various films.

Tom’s Walks the WOM

Tom’s Walks the WOM

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Ben at Church of the Customer and John at Brand Autopsy have kindly shared the remarkable story of Tom’s Shoes. In a nutshell:

Strategy: Passion + a Simple Mission

For every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need. One for One

Ton Shoe’ing a Baby

Advertising Budget: $0. To quote the founder, “It’s hard to do advertising in a personal way” Marketing dollars are spent on getting involving customers in the mission – truly cutting the marketing clutter. In an MSNBC interview, a retailer explains that the shoes started selling after posting a picture of the shoes being handed out and the mission over the display.

Results:

  • 60,000 pairs donated and a goal of 200,000 by the end of 2008.
  • People who think the shoes are ugly on first glance (including me) purchasing them and breathlessly waiting for them to arrive.
  • A growing army of volunteer marketers who want to be asked about their ugly shoes so they can tell the story.

I am equally excited about the shoes, mission and conversational capital that I just bought!