The particular companies profiled in this article told personal stories about how email didn’t generate the same positive results. In some cases, the owners actually heard from long-time customers asking what had happened to the letters/reminders/postcards they had received in the past.

This is because email is beside the point.  Establishing a connection with a prospect or customer is and always has been what’s most important.  Think first about your history and what type of communications have worked in the past. What kind of outreach prospects or clients appreciate. What makes them feel special. What generates orders, referrals and repeat business.  One of the owners profiled in the article discontinued his art-based postcard mailings, only to discover the cards permanently displayed in his clients’ offices.  His customers started calling him asking whether they’d been taken off the company’s mailing list.

What we have right there, friends, is some serious brand love.

Testing is fine.  It would be foolish not to test new technologies, which are usually cheaper and more easily wielded than the old ones.  And compromises must sometimes be made in order to preserve cash.  But – putting dollars aside – the beginning of the value chain is the relationship with the customer, and at the distant far end is the tactics you choose to reinforce and grow that relationship.  Too many executives (particularly those in small companies, who either can’t afford good marketing help or get less-than-great advice) are putting social media at the forefront of their thinking because they’re reading about whatever the heck it is everywhere they go. 

I tell these folks that they were right the first time when their gut was to do something special – something that showed they cared.  If you can replicate this more cheaply, by all means do it:  but don’t let any new whiz-bang communications vehicle get in the way.  

Sghetti’s Italian Bistro, a local restaurant in Pennsylvania, has established a “pay what you think it’s worth” policy.  The menu no longer shows specific prices, opting instead for a suggested price range by category: appetizers $3-$9, pasta $6-$12 and so on.  The offer is good for parties of 8 or less at dinner only, beginning at 4pm.

“[The recession] is sad, for senior citizens and young families,” says the spot’s owner, Eugene Razzano. “…we can do something to empower people.”  Razzano recognizes that some diners won’t be fair, but believes that the press coverage and increased traffic – particularly return traffic – will make this a successful proposition overall. 

I think this is brilliant.  Razzano has been very clear that he is assessing the program on a week-to-week basis.  High-margin beverages are not included, and parties are asked to tip the wait staff, as usual.  He’s getting full-blown word of mouth, while still protecting himself on the downside.

Part of the commentary on this blog lately has seen me preaching restraint to businesses advertising at such a sensitive time.  If you’re going to put a message out there, be 100% certain that it connects to how people are feeling and what they are experiencing.  Even if a negative reaction happens “outside your target audience,” it can have an outsized ability to impact business over the mid- to short-term.  My opinion is that companies including Pepsi and Hawker have taken risks with their brand images by promoting messages that are out of tune with the public zietgeist.

Sghetti’s is spot on.

In December, Domino’s created an online-only promotion offering a free pizza to site visitors using the promo code ”bailout.” The promotion never got final approval internally… but someone didn’t tell the pizza retailer’s online tech team.

A clever consumer living in a suburb of Cincinnati somehow caught on to the live promo code last week and before you can see “meat lovers special,” Domino’s had given away 11,000 free pizzas.  In less than 24 hours.

The news spread quickly, fueled in part by online moms at sites like www.CincyMomsLikeMe.com.  If you’re curious about the power of online moms and aren’t familiar with the Motrin Moms event last November, I really would suggest you check it out.  Do not screw with these ladies!

Things became even more complicated by the fact that Domino’s retail stores are franchised.  A man who owns 14 locations in the Cincy area thinks he gave away somewhere between 600 and 700 pizzas.  Corporate has promised to reimburse all franchisees.  Maybe the stores will even see an upside:  the event got hundreds of people to try the new ordering engine at Dominos.com (which is pretty good, by the way).

Depending on how you look at things, Dominos is either lucky or unlucky the promotion wasn’t discovered two days later – on April Fool’s Day…

A woman in New York, Danika Landers, started the site as a blog in 2007, and it uses Google Maps to help you find the nearest public bathrooms anywhere you may find yourself in need of one.  It purports to be the largest (only?) “toilet database and locating service” in the world.  It is essentially a wiki that is easily accessible via mobile devices including the iPhone and Blackberry.  Both the site and the downloadable apps are free to use.

Danika describes the impetus for creating the site as a personal realization that “that the act of relieving oneself is somewhat an artform” that becomes suddenly complicated “when our personal space is not our personal space.”  Anyone traveling with an infant or parent – or on any highway road trip in America – can attest to the veracity of such a conclusion. 

Danika has a little extra fun with the site by allowing users to submit a rating for the public restrooms in question; a rating of a 2.5 or over will be characterized as a “sit,” while a toilet with a lower rating will be a “squat.”  As such a rating might change with every use (ick!), I would suggest that a user make his or her own judgment in the moment:  this is truly a case where past performance may not indicate future results. P&G jumped on the opportunity to sponsor the site and its sensibility as a great fit with the brand’s overall efforts to support grassroots activities that make the bathroom experience a positive one. The company has set up mobile bathrooms at events like state fairs in the past, has had Charmin Restrooms in NYC’s Times Square for three years running (see dramatic video here!) and – my favorite – toured the U.S. from 2003 to 2005 with a bathroom mobile nicknamed ”Potty Palooza.”

“Our goal is to connect Charmin with innovative conversations and solutions as a brand that understands the importance of bringing the best bathroom experience to consumers, even when they’re away from home,” says Jacques Hagopian, brand manager for Charmin.

This blog has commented on companies sponsoring public bathrooms before – remember Visa’s sponsorship of porta-potties at a music festival last year?  While consumers may always appreciate this benefit, SitorSquat.com is likely to get bigger results for Charmin* based on brand fit and is the only site of its kind with which the brand has associated itself.   1,600 users have downloaded the mobile app thus far and the site has over 500,000 UVs since launch.  Nice find!

* Lysol just announced that it’s taking over the women’s restrooms at 9 NASCAR races this year. This also sounds like a decent brand fit, obviously.  Assuming Charmin’s sponsorship wasn’t too expensive, though, the remote/mobile aspect of SitorSquat makes it a winner as it puts the Charmin brand in the home and on the phone of thousands of users every day.

While I’m sure many airlines are experimenting, this particular piece features Alaska Airlines, where Steve Jarvis, the company’s head of sales and customer experience (and a man intensely focused on delighting high-value customers), talks about what they’re doing and learning along the way.  Wordlessly delivering a frequent flyer’s favorite drink (in coach) “is not about the cocktail.  The point is the recognition and thanks for your business.”  

As a frequent flyer desperate just to be treated like a human being when I get to the airport, Steve Jarvis is my hero for recognizing that it’s good to be nice to people you need and actually doing something about it.

This will not be easy.  The foundation of my entire career is customer segmentation and CRM.  I know – in technicolor – how gigantic the technological and personal demands can be inside a company determined to change.

For starters, identifying even what customers do today – at every touchpoint – requires considerable data alignment.  As with banks, airlines tend to have (a) outdated systems, that (b) don’t talk to one another.  So whether a customer buys a ticket online (and when and for how much) is likely to be invisible to a gate agent.  A phone representative most definitely does not know about the luggage problems you’ve had 2x this year already, and a customer service rep at the airport has no idea whether an email notification re. a cancelled flight was delivered to you or not.  If this information exists, it typically sits in silos that either must be refitted or, sometimes, blown up entirely.

Second, the modeling capabilities needed to capture and place a quantifiable value on behavior – evolving usually into some kind of score that informs the type of service a customer receives – is imprecise at best and far more sophisticated in industries that have been at this for decades, like banks and credit card companies.   The European airlines have a jump on us, though, and that’s good news for the learning curve.

Third, the really-really stripped down implication of all this work is that the value assigned to a customer will change the marketers’ human behavior.  This is very hard – far beyond basic training and comp changes.  In a crowded airport, you finally reach the counter, already yelling, and the agent is supposed to capture your name, “read” your score and follow the instruction that would be appropriate for a customer with that score.  Good luck.  It’s doable, but must be implemented with patience and empathy.

So if this is the direction in which the airlines realize they must head… fantastic!  There are a lot of weazened but wise customer experience/CRM/segmentation veterans out here whom I’m sure would want to help.  I, for one, will continue to watch for hints of progress, both on the plane and off.

The Internet did this for car buying years ago:  between Consumer Reports, Edmonds.com, CarsDirect and a myriad of other sites, the shopper who would have previously driven to whatever dealerships happened to be local now has a lot more bargaining power… and can buy a car from anywhere in the country if the (online) price is right.

To that end, I recently commented on a TechCrunch story about a new company called DriverSide.  Like RepairPal, DriverSide.com intends to help cash-strapped consumers more effectively maintain their cars instead of having to sell or replace them.  My point was that these sites will only begin to reach their real potential when a user can write his/her need and have mechanics compete for the work via online bids, a la an eBay auction.

Almost right after I posted this comment, I stumbled on a unique application of this concept from the Netherlands: Spaarbod.  You thought Bankrate made it easier to shop for interest rates?  Spaarbod permits Dutch consumers to specify how much money they’d like to bank, for how long and on what terms, and the site (like Bankrate) returns the best rates publically available at the time.  You can accept one of these offers immediately, or Spaarbod will send your request (minus your personal information) to participating banks who can then bid on your money.  Within 24 hours, you get an email listing the five highest bidders. 

The service is free to use, and winning banks pays Spaarbod a commission when bids result in new deposits.

It’s not difficult to imagine these auctions going live, where each participating bank would have an employee bidding in real-time for a user’s deposit.   

Heck yeah!  And why do I have to shop around for the privilege of giving you my money anyway??

Such a seemingly simple idea but – on a marketwide scale – this model has major implications for advertising and marketing overall.  If engaged consumers (buyers) approach marketers (sellers) when they are in the market for a seller’s services, those sellers could potentially spend far less money on spray-and-pray mass marketing… and pass the savings on to the customer in the form of lower prices or, in this case, higher interest rates.  The advertiser is likely to spend less and the customer gets a higher-value, more customized outcome. 

Doc Searls (who also may have been the first person to use the word “conversation” in a marketing context) first coined the phrase “intention economy” to describe the idea of markets designed around engaged buyers instead of message-pusing sellers.  I’ll explore the intention economy in another post.

Recently, Jeffry caught something that tells us just how bad the financial situation is.

Yes folks, these institutions are so upset, and have become so unstable, that they are literally peeing their own metaphorical pants.  And their grammar stinks.  Oh, I know:  it’s shocking!

Jeffry points out something that shouldn’t be a surprise, however:  anything that represents a financial company today that is viewed or experienced by the public – even signage in a local branch - deserves additional scrutiny.  The smallest failure in personal service can undermine costly efforts elsewhere.

Did I mention that this sign was posted on the door of a credit union inside the U.S. Capitol Building?

Jeffry_Pilcher TheFinancialBrand.com Politico.com

As of Valentine’s Day, Experian will no longer make its credit score, or FICO, available to individual consumers.  So while you previously could have gone to myFICO.com and purchased any or all of three scores – from Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – there will now be only two.

Given what’s happening in the economy, it seems an odd time from a PR point of view to take such an action.  Lenders are raising their credit standards, and a yes/no decision can sometimes come down to a matter of a few points on your FICO.  If you are in the market for a loan, you want to see all the same information that lender is seeing:  particularly because individuals often find errors in their credit records that must be corrected.

The stakes are particularly high because Experian itself will continue to sell (your) FICO scores based on its data to lenders, such as banks.  This means that the lending institution will see a score that you can no longer see for yourself. 

Fair Isaac expressed surprise at the action at a time when consumers are particularly “concerned about their credit standing.”  Of course, there is some competition between all these parties, and Fair Isaac actually sued Experian in 2006 on an unrelated matter.  That lawsuit is still outstanding, which probably doesn’t exactly create a spirit of cooperation between the two firms.

If you are in the market for a loan or credit card, I would recommend buying your Experian-based FICO score while you still can.  And always pull your other FICOs once a year for free at www.annualcreditreport.com.

FICO credit_score Fair_Isaac Equifax Experian

Colloquy has released a white paper reflecting the results of an October 2008 survey that measured the intersection between reward program membership and online word-of-mouth (WOM) activity among those members.

While I hope it won’t come as a big surprise, membership in and usage of a brand’s reward program is a significant predictor of a consumer’s likelihood to speak positively about your brand online. The more active the frequent user/shopper/flyer in your program, the greater the chance that you will experience the happy halo effect of him/her praising you online.  This is particularly true among women, who have become a driving force in terms of discussing and sharing products and experiences on the Web (Motrin, anyone?).

The larger take-away here – the hardest one, I think, for large companies to absorb - is that everything is connected now.  The idea that you could treat your customers one way and your employees another, without affecting your public persona, is no longer relevant.  Cut your charitable activities without the “outside world” finding out?  Forget it.  Increase mileage requirements in your frequent flyer program, and it will not only affect the opinions of your members, but also those members’ Twitter readers (who may not even be your customers).

One person with an anonymous blog and a catchy URL can impact your reputation around the world.  

Of course The New Champion Customers is just a tip of this iceberg, but it offers an interesting angel and chock-full of great charts.  Take a look.

Motrin momsColloquyWOMMA