Old Style Thinking

This article on an entrepreneur's idea of using the lines between parking spots as a place for advertising is interesting.

It'll probably work and make some money, but it's such a classic example of old-style marketing thinking.

Consumers have been trained to ignore advertising because they are bombarded with it constantly. In response, marketers make it more omnipresent and intrusive. Consumers will then learn to ignore more of it until another marketer comes up with a new place to put it.

In the process, we (as a profession) are helping to degrade our shared environment. In this case, I think there's an issue of functionality - depending on how this is implemented, parking lots could go from expanses of concrete with clearly marked spots for cars into a riot of color, words, and images that doesn't work as well as a parking lot.

We're responding to consumer's distaste for our messages by ratcheting the messages up another notch. For a brief moment it seemed that we, as a group, were going to get smarter and started making advertising more targeted and useful for consumers. In other words, instead of turning up the volume, create advertising that was truly useful to people.

That moment has passed for most of the marketing profession, and these kinds of ideas are the result. It'll probably work for a time, until everyone tunes it out. Sad.

Defining Spam Down

The biggest challenge in using new technology for marketing is stupid marketers. Consider, for example, this example, reported on the Church of the Customer blog: Bluetooth-enabled phone users at Heathrow Airport were bombarded with spam messages asking them to download a commercial.

Virgin Atlantic has been testing this out in their airport lounges for a while. "I think it's done very well because it enables the customers [to choose]. It doesn't force it on them," says Charles Vine, manager of the lounges.

Excuse me? If my cell phone starts demanding my attention, I will probably assume I'm getting a call or a text message from someone I know. If it turns out to be Virgin Atlantic asking me to download a commercial, I am getting an annoying, intrusive messages that I didn't ask for and don't want. Where is the choice there? Simply because I can stop the next step, a video download?

I actually already disable Bluetooth on my phone whenever I enter a place like an airport, because of security issues with the technology. It's fine in my home or driving in my car, but I've got no desire to walk through a crowded airport with the possibility of someone hacking into my phone. Now that's replaced by a more prosaic concern: getting spammed.

Just as "permission email" has come to mean "anything we tricked you into signing up for of you didn't insist five times you don't want," too many marketers are eager to take any opportunity for intrusive marketing that annoys customers. We are our own worst enemy. We find ways to annoy customers (spam, pop ups and pop unders and interstitials) and customers find ways to block us.

Does it occur to the marketers behind this stuff that perhaps annoying your customers is a bad paradigm?

Customer Service is Marketing

This is an ongoing refrain of mine: your customer service process is a marketing issue. Your web content, even the customer interaction portions - no, especially the customer interaction portions - are marketing issues. As a marketer you've got to pay attention to this.

I'm going to give you two examples of service failure that have a marketing impact.

The first comes from a newspaper web site. The paper is the Washington Post, one of the most respected papers in the United States. I read their site for two reasons: it's one of the best national news sources available, and as a former Washingtonian I have a certain sentimental attachment to it.

I subsribed to one of their email newsletters. Then I changed my email address. I kept getting email at the old address. I went to the web site to update my address.

Unfortunately, they had my new, current address and there was no login under my old address. So there was no way to change it. I wrote to them and explained what was going on. Here's the response I received:

Thank you for contacting washingtonpost.com. Your suggestions and comments help us make washingtonpost.com a better site. Although it is impossible to respond to every individual comment, we do read all of them and will forward your thoughts to the appropriate people at washingtonpost.com and The Washington Post newspaper. If you are looking for answers to a specific question, try our Help & Feedback page for answers at http://www.washingtonpost.com/help.

Here's the first problem with this response: I had used the Help & Feedback page. There was a form on it to report problems. It was not a generic feedback form (for which this response would have been appropriate); it was a form specifically to report problems. I got a response that suggested that my message had gone to the wrong place.

Here's the second problem: I never did get any response. The problem did get fixed; but no one ever bothered to tell me about it. I received that message on August 23, over a week ago.

My conclusion: it's unclear whether anyone at the paper's site is getting trouble reports, or what is happening. Now how likely am I to subscribe to any other newsletters of theirs? Since ad rates are based on readership numbers, that's lost revenue.

The second example is from Fedex Kinko's. Before being bought by Fedex, Kinko's had a very good system for pricing and ordering print jobs online. I was checking pricing for a client who it seemed might need a rush laser print of brochures.

There is no longer pricing on the web site. You can upload files to place an order, but you can't find out how much it will cost first. This makes the site far less useful. So I used their feedback form to tell them that this was very unhelpful to this potential customer.

They did respond, but it was a very bad response:

Because our pricing and services vary by location, we ask that you please contact your local Kinko's for price quotes and additional information. To find the closest Kinko's to

Thank you for writing you, please visit our website at ,www.kinkos.com and click on "Advanced Locator" on the right hand side of the page. The next page has a search function. You may also call our 24-hour Hotline at 1-800-2-KINKOS (800-254-6567) for location information.

Okay, a response with a sentence that just stops mid-stream is not too good. And basically Kinko's has downgraded their online services. How hard would it be to let users pick a store and check pricing? I can find out if an item is in stock at my local Best Buy or CompUSA using their web sites. But Kinko's can't provide a price?

Their competitors often can, so that's less business for Kinko's.

It's not enough to create a brand and tell consumers about it. You need to make sure you're delivering on the brand. That means you have to stick your nose into other areas of the business that touch customers and make sure things are working well.