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Oct
27

No Really, You Shouldn’t Have

By | Branding, Focus, In the Life, Marketing

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Best Buy Promotion

My birthday is in a couple of weeks.  We have a tradition in my family where you’re not allowed to buy yourself anything during the month leading up to a birthday, so I’ve been hurriedly adding things to my Amazon.com wish list for most of this month.  The last time I broke that rule, my brothers swore they’d never buy me anything again (apparently they’d already picked up and wrapped a CD I bought myself the weekend before my 18th birthday).

Luckily, this family rule also helps me avoid a lot of promotional advertising leading up to my birthday.  Different restaurants I frequent will send me gift vouchers – my favorite pub (sadly, it’s now closed) used to send me a certificate for a free drink.  I get cards from financial advisors, courtesy phone calls from the guy who changes my oil, and once even a thank you note and Starbucks gift card from a client.

Everyone seems to know when my birthday is coming, and everyone who likes me to spend money hopes to earn my business by being extra nice and offering me a special, timely discount.

Today, though, a particular company did the exact opposite.  In my inbox was an advertisement from Best Buy.  You know, the big-box electronics retailer that I don’t buy big ticket items from because their service department kinda sucks?  Yeah, them.  Apparently my one or two DVD purchases last year has kept me high enough on their radar to warrant a special offer.

They’re inviting me to give them money to celebrate my birthday!

Exciting, huh?  Not a discount.  Not a freebie.  Not even a personalized birthday card.  But an invitation to spend more money in exchange for triple to quadruple points on whatever I buy.

For the record – you normally get 1 point for every $1 you spend.  And since it takes 250 points to get a $5 coupon back, I need to spend between … $62 to $80 just to save $5.

Not so enticing a deal when you put it that way, is it?

If I were in the market for a new LCD display, a new printer, or a new PC this might seem like a stellar deal.  But since I never buy anything that expensive the few weeks leading up to my birthday, it’s not likely.

Here’s the thing.  Best Buy is trying to appeal to my spoiled sense of self-importance.  They’re sending me an email to wish me a happy birthday and offer me a special deal to convince me that I stick out from the crowd.  They know I use reward points because they track my purchasing behavior through my rewards card.

But then they fall short.

Rewards cards, club cards, priority cards.  They exist to give the vendor a better idea of who you are.  It’s a decentralized, corporate model for relationship building – by tracking my purchases, the company can better predict what I’ll purchase in the future, when I’ll spend a lot of money, and to which advertisements I’ll be likely to respond.

Obviously, Best Buy isn’t using their cards this way.  No personalized shopping recommendations accompanied the email.  No personalized notes.  No we-know-you-and-earnestly-want-to-celebrate-your-birthday sentiment.

The entire email reads as yet another corporate attempt to trick me into shelling out my hard-earned cash for something I don’t actually need.  Which is a bit sad, really.

I thought marketing and consumer relations had come a bit farther than this …

Oct
07

It’s Not My Job

By | Branding, Development, Focus

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It’s Always Your Job

One of the coolest eras of my life was when I worked for the Boy Scouts.  I took 6-8 weeks every summer and lived out of a tent in the middle of nowhere.  No electricity.  No Internet.  No cell phones.  No television.

It was heavenly.

Working for the Scouts also taught me some great work ethics.  The first rule has defined my attitude towards work ever since:

Work until you think you can’t.  Then keep working until someone tells you to stop.

Having that voice in my head helps me work all night to close out client projects, fight to finish difficult – sometimes messy – cleanup jobs, and run long distances despite being tired.  It’s a rare sentiment among many people in my age group, and rarer still among those in my industry.

The second rule we learned was that everything is your job.  At camp, we used outhouses.  They’d frequently run out of supplies or get … um … messy and a Scout or Scouter would come and ask for help from the staff.  The one thing you were never to say is “it’s not my job.”

Everyone, from the trainees to the area directors to the business manager to the camp cook was expected to immediately stop whatever they were doing and help whenever a Scout asked a question.  If you were on your way to take a break, you’d detour to stock the TP or hose out a mess.  It didn’t matter who you were, what your jot title was, or how much you were paid.  It was never not your job.

As a result, we built an incredibly coherent unit.  I’m still close friends with many of the staff, and we’ll be trekking back up to camp in two weeks to labor away in the mud and rain (that’s what we do for fun, after all).  We haven’t worked together as a camp staff in over 6 years, but there’s still a deep meaning to what it means to be a “Cooper Staffer.”

Every organization has a brand, and it is the responsibility of each and every person in that company to live up to the brand.  The intern should be encouraged to learn the jobs of the people above him.  The CEO should be willing to offer her time to customer support when call loads are high.  Every member of the brand has a hand in shaping it – no matter what their job title might be.

WPMU.org … A Great Bad Example

Yesterday, I was alerted to a blog post on WPMU.org about plugin localization.  I don’t normally read that site, but figured it was worth a look based on who’d sent out the link via Twitter.  Frankly, I wasn’t happy. [Read more...]

Apr
13

The Mind Share Market

By | Branding, Focus, Marketing

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I recently had the opportunity to review a copy of The Mind Share Market, by Nicolas Pujol.  It’s the one of the better straight marketing books I’ve perused lately, and I wanted to give it a fair shake.  Unfortunately, my schedule and the heavy technical nature of much of the book made this review take longer than it should have.

The book on a whole is a clever combination of case studies, anecdotal illustrations, and technical evaluation.  For a lay reader this might be a bit intimidating, but you can easily skip most of the technical analysis and discussion – the graphical illustrations and prose-format case studies are more than informative enough to bring home a point.

One of the best illustrations, though, is the concept of price.  Pujol takes the reader through a careful analysis of a real MIT experiment regarding customer purchase behavior.   [Read more...]

Feb
16

Guy Kawasaki – Enchantment

By | Branding, Focus, Marketing

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Enchantment - The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions

Last week, I received an advance copy of Guy Kawasaki’s new book, Enchantment.  I’ve actually been waiting for this book for a while now, so I put down my Tom Clancy novel and immediately dug in.  For a business book, it was amazingly easy to read, and I was proud to finish it in just 3 days despite a heavy work schedule.

Easy to read, but powerful.  Kawasaki’s book is filled with practical advice on how to not just know your customers, but to enchant them.

If you’ve read this blog for very long, you know about my fascination with developing relationships with your “perfect customer.”  Enchantment is very much the same idea, albeit with a far more refined tone and the weight of a former Chief Evangelist for our favorite consumer brand behind it. [Read more...]

Dec
13

What is Twitter?

By | Branding, Family, Focus, Friends, Marketing

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I’ve been asked this by several people over the past year.  And, having been somewhat more active on Twitter lately, I think it would be a good idea to actually explain both what Twitter is and why you should care.

Vocabulary

First, some terms you need to know:

  • Twitter is a social networking application and website that allows you to broadcast short messages to large groups of people.
  • A Tweet is one of these short-format messages.
  • A Tweep is a user on Twitter – think of it as a Twitter Peep.

Use in a sentence: Twitter is a tool you use to send Tweets to your Tweeps. [Read more...]