Decision Making by Committee

Focus groups are dangerous beasts, as this cartoon noted on the Church of the Customer blog points out. But this is true of any group opinion exercise; how many times have you sat through a brainstorming session or a team meeting on naming a product and left feeling like everything interesting and creative had been killed?

Sirius-ly Wrong

I got an email from Sirius, the satellite radio company, the other day. I'm a customer, so it's not wrong for me to hear from them. The header read "Invitation to give SIRIUS your opinions in future surveys."

Based on that headline, you might think you were being invited to join a group of customers who would participate in research surveys to help Sirius understand their customers' preferences. That's a perfectly fine thing for them to do.

But that's not quite what they're doing:

Our research partners may contact you via e-mail to help enhance our programming, service, and other offerings. There is no obligation to participate, but we would like to be able to check in with you occasionally to see if you have a minute to answer a few questions about your service

If you would prefer not to participate in these e-mail surveys, please click on the link below to let us know you do NOT want to participate in email surveys from SIRIUS.

So, no, it's not an invitation to particpate. It's a notice that Sirius is going to give their partners your email address and you're going to hear from them unless you opt out. Which is not acceptable behavior. My response is to tell Sirius that they do not have my permission to send me any kind of email about anything, ever.

It's great example of how not to use email to talk to your customers.

Truth and Lies

What happens when you create an ad campaign that talks about things that differentiate your product from the competition? It should tell consumers why you're a better choice and lead to increased sales, right?

Right, but there's a catch: the differentiators need to be real. Or at least perceived as real. Otherwise, you've got an expensive mess. That's my prediction for this set of Mac vs PC ads from Apple.

They're cute. They're clever. And for anybody who's used a PC and a Mac, they're obviously a bunch of crap.

Macs never need to be restarted? I nearly spat up my coffee watching that one. PCs don't talk to digital cameras? Huh? Macs don't get viruses? Not as much, it's true, but if a consumer has been watching the news lately, they're hearing a different story.

The ads reek of a marketing team that's been talking to themselves and their most devoted customers, and nobody else. I expect that most PC users will see the ads, think "that's cute," and go out and buy a new PC in the future.

Of course, Apple has a lot of great selling points for their computers. They are sleek, attractive machines. The desktop models offer a lot of power for the price. If you're looking for a machine to surf the web and manage photos and music, they're a good choice (though a lot of Windows machines are good choices also).

None of that is evident in the ads: it's the same old "We are cooler and better than you" nonsense that's given them a tiny market share and forced the company to rely on iPod sales to make its numbers. The next time Apple's ready to do some new advertising, they might want to talk to their potential customers and find out what might really make them purchase something from them. This isn't it.