Marketing Hipster

A couple of weeks ago, I decided with summer coming it was time to get myself a new pair of sandals. I did what many many other people do when they are searching for something online, I began at a search engine. In Google, I typed in Birkenstock. From there based on the natural search results, I don’t click on PPC, I began looking at many different web sites to see what kind of selection they had, what their prices were and what kind of experience they gave me on their site. In today’s world, what a user experiences when they land on a web site will have a significant impact on not only if that person buys, but also, how that person thinks and feels about the company, brand and products. In other words, if your web site is crap, users will equate your company with crap as well.

As I surfed on these sites, if I ran into any problems like not being able to find what I was looking for quickly and easily, poor content or product pictures, I would immediately close that browser tab and move on to the next result in Google. You have one chance when a user lands on your site, if you do not take advantage of that chance, you most likely will not get another.

After looking at a half dozen different sites, I finally landed on a site that I really liked. The site had a clean look and feel, good navigation, great content and product pictures. Before even knowing what I wanted to buy, I had already decided where I was going to purchase from. After a little bit of time surfing and exploring different styles, I decided. The checkout process was easy and before you can say, “Damn Fricken Hippie” my new sandals were purchased.

Now many E-commerce players out there might believe that this ends the customer experience. I would disagree and say that once an order is purchased, the experience continues with the kind of service a user gets post purchase.

About a day or two later after ordering, I got an email from the company saying that my order had shipped. Fabulous! The company did everything right in the email which included a link to UPS so I can track my order. I clicked on the link with great anticipation to see when I could expect the package and that is when the wheels came off the wagon. UPS’ expected delivery was 9 days. NINE DAYS?!?!?!? Was this package coming in from Neptune or had the pony express come back?? NINE DAYS?!?!?!? What takes nine days to be delivered these days?

Annoyed, I went back to the companies web site and found in very small letters that ground shipping can take from 3 to 11 days. Now maybe I should of looked more closely when I was ordering, but I would guess that I am far from the only person who had ordered from this company and then was surprised at the great length of time it will take for delivery. If that was properly communicated to me during the checkout process, I would of probably been willing to pay more for quicker shipping, but instead this was hidden from me.

This company just lost any chance of me becoming a repeat buyer for them. But even more importantly, they turned a user, me, from a possible customer evangelist into a person who will never recommend this company to his family and friends. No matter where a customer is in the process, the customer experience never ends.

Technorati Tags: search engine, Google, Birkenstock, PPC, E-commerce, customer experience

I don’t have too many TV shows that I watch religiously anymore, but one that I try to never miss is 60 Minutes. I find it to be an incredibly well done news show and week in and week out they offer stories that I find interesting and I am able to learn something. I love everything about the show until the last two minutes when they, for reasons beyond me, allow Andy Rooney to do his little commentary gig. I have been a watcher of 60 minutes for years and have always wondered why do they allow Rooney to do his tired and boring commentary week in and week out? What caused me to finally write something about this was the story that he did tonight.

Tonight he pulled out letters that were sent to him and he spent his lousy couple of minutes mocking the people who sent him these letters. Just to make sure we are clear and you happened to not of seen this, these letters were not bad letters, these letters were actually nice letters sent to Andy. For some reason Andy decided to degrade the people most important to him, 60 Minutes and CBS, THE DAMN AUDIENCE!

Even if his previous riveting episodes that included showing off how messy his desk was and what books he has in his office, did not prove that it is time to put this guy out to pasture, this show I think surely did. What he clearly showed tonight is that he does not give a damn about who is watching him and he believes no matter what he says, everyone will tune back in next week. I wonder, what would happen if everyone in America would change the channel when Andy’s segment was being introduced? Do you think that might be a cause of concern for the advertisers who are paying for that time slot? Do you think that might get CBS and 60 minutes attention?

Very simply put Andy, what do you offer each week with your little stories? I could care less about your desk, your books and probably next week, you will give us a tour of your sock drawer. You don’t get it do you? It is NOT about you anymore, it should of never been about you. It’s about us, your viewers, the people who watch you. Either begin realizing that or do us all a favor and get out.

Technorati Tags: 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney

Recently, I have been enjoying listening to a number of different podcasts. My favorite podcast without question is This American Life. If you have never listed to this on NPR, I absolutely recommend checking it out, their shows are so interesting, I just cannot get enough. I also have been enjoying video podcasts from the TED conference and Zefrank is very funny at times.

This weekend I was going through iTunes‘ directory of podcasts and saw The American Experience had a podcast, a great show on PBS. I subscribed and downloaded a number of episodes that looked interesting to me. On my way into work today, I turned one on and began to listen. After about 5 minutes, the damn thing just stopped. I thought maybe it did not download all the way or something when I realized that all of the ones I downloaded were 5 minutes in length.

They were previews… My question is WHY?!?!?! Why of why PBS did you do this? The episodes have already played, it’s not like I am getting an early listening to this? You’re fricken PBS, you don’t play commercials and even if you did, you could just add the commercials in the Podcast, I’ll wait. More importantly, when I went back into iTunes, I could not even buy them if I wanted to.. Boy, that is some great user experience you PBS’ers are putting on over there.

I then noticed a number of customer reviews and they all said the exact same thing I am saying. Why are these only 5 minutes out of an hour episode? Why don’t you bother telling people that they are previews before they download them?

When are TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and music executives going to get it. Technology has enabled and empowered people to do things on their own schedule and not yours! If there is a show that I want to watch, I will DVR it and watch it when I am damn well good and ready. If there is something I want to read in the New York Times, I will sign in and read it at 4 am, in bed, if I so choose.

So PBS, you think by giving me a 5 minute preview, I am going to do what? Buy the episode? HA! You heard me, I said HA! I could not buy them even if I wanted to, but what you have done is forced me to unsubscribe from your podcasts and remove any proof that you ever existed on my iPod. BE GONE! In other words, you are toast…

When are you guys going to wake up and realize the game has changed?

Technorati Tags: podcasts, This American Life, NPR, TED conference, Zefrank, iTunes, The American Experience, user experience

Kim Klaver has a great post where she writes an open letter to Mark Schweitzer the Chief Marketing Officer of Sprint. As an ex-Sprint customer, I could not agree with more with her post and thoughts. Sprint spends a little over a billion dollars a year in advertising, but from the outside it sure looks like they do not spend a dime on their customer service.

I spent many a night on the phone with Sprint trying to figure out one issue or the other with them until I came to the conclusion that Sprint just does not get it. They seem to not understand that it costs a great deal more to get a new customer than keep an existing one.

Technorati Tags: Kim Klaver, Mark Schweitzer, Chief Marketing Officer, Sprint

One of the great things about the time we are living in is the immediate dissemination of information available to us all. For example, today, Circuit City announced that they were laying off 3,400 of their highest paid workers and replacing them with lower paid and less experienced workers. And if this was not enough, they are offering to those laid off workers an opportunity to re-apply for their same jobs at of course a lower pay rate.

Pretty much what Circuit City has done is taken the employees who have been their the longest, who have worked to be knowledgeable about their products and services, who have tried to be the best sales people they can and have been kicked to the curb and replaced with people who will not be able to do the job as well as them. Though that is not important to Circuit City, what is important is they will be paid less.

I could put on a three piece suit and pretend I am Lou Dobbs and argue about the decline of the middle class, but I am not going to do that. My question is what is Circuit City’s management saying to its consumers, its customers, us? My read is they are saying that we really are not too concerned about giving you our customers the best customer experience when you come into our stores or order our products online. Our only concern is to our shareholders and to make MORE MONEY!

What bothers me even more is it does not seem to bother Circuit City’s management that news like this would cause their customers to stop going to their stores and buying their products… Do they think that we NEED Circuit City so much that we cannot live without them? They can give us the bottom of the barrel service and we will keep coming back?

I can’t speak for everyone, but Circuit City, you have just lost a good customer with me because it will be a cold day in hell when I shop with you again. You have to realize that there are consequences to your actions and I am hoping that through stories like mine and throughout the blogosphere we see in the coming months a significant drop in your revenues and you realize that just like each one of us, you are held accountable for your actions.

Update:  I have started a petition to hopefully get Circuit City management’s attention.  If you would like to let your voice be heard, please click here and sign your name to an online petition.  Many thanks.

Technorati Tags: Circuit City, laying off

TechCrunch posted a great article a couple of days ago focused on Google‘s new PPA (Pay Per Action) service. I don’t think this should come as surprise to anyone in this industry. You knew eventually Google would have to do it. If it helps smaller businesses with issues like click fraud than great. The only people who should be really concerned are the affiliate networks who might be in real trouble.

What I think is significant about this announcement is what TC discusses towards the end of their post – Google’s announcement of their new “Text Link Format”. What this means is the days of the Adsense banner sitting on the top, bottom, left or right hand sides of a web page are over. Now when a publisher users certain words in a story they post, those words will be underlined and when rolled over, a Google PPC or PPA ad will pop-up.

Why don’t we check out Google’s “Our Philosophy” page, shall we?

“From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible.”

Really? So you’re saying that when someone is trying to read something on a web page throwing up pop-up rollovers in their face is the best user experience????

“While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site”

Huh… It sure seems like this decision has done exactly that! You sacrificed the user experience to increase shareholder value.

“Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction.”

Now I did not graduate from Stanford with a doctorate in everything, but Larry and Sergey can you tell me something more distracting than a fricken pop-up?!?!?!?!?!

Google tried to bury this information within a larger announcement an old trick that has been used in PR for years. In politics, they call it “taking out the trash”. They did this to try to avoid the scrutiny and discussions within the blogosphere. I am hoping that my article among many others will not allow them to sweep this issue under the rug.

Technorati Tags: TechCrunch, Google, click fraud, affiliate networks

Yesterday afternoon I was getting some work done and per usual I had the TV on in the background. I happen to have Nascar on. Even though I live in North Carolina, I am not really a Nascar fan, but for some reason it was on my television as I was working. Over the couple of hours that it was on, I noticed something that made me wonder what these people were thinking. One of the sponsors for the race was DLP Technologies. If you are not familiar, this is the technology by Texas Instruments that uses mirrors that is supposed to make the pictures on televisions with DLP look amazing. I am sure you have seen their commercials before, they usually have a little girl and a baby elephant in them.

What really made me scratch my head was that they had either been given as a sponsor or bought significant air time during the race. Their commercial ran almost every commercial break based on my unofficial count. What drove me crazy was that it was the same commercial each and every time?!?!?!?! I don’t get it.. This company spent millions of dollars on being a sponsor of a Nascar race, they spent millions of dollars more on a media buy to get their commercial seen all day, but they were not willing to actually produce more than just one lousy commercial? Do you think that was done on purpose? Do you think someone internally actually brought up that the same commercial was going to be run a dozen or so times during the race and that was acceptable with everyone? Towards the end of the race, I was praying for that baby elephant to go on a rampage.

DLP, I am your target audience. Mid-thirties man who watches sports religiously and who is presently looking at big screen televisions to purchase for my home. You had a perfect opportunity to sell me yesterday and you failed miserably. Now I am questioning your brand. If you do such a lousy job marketing your product, should I be concerned about the quality of your product?

Technorati Tags: Nascar, DLP

Segueing from my previous post, Microsoft recently launched what they are calling, the “Financial MySpace” Microsoft Dynamics Live. I would love to meet the people who come up with the names of Microsoft products and ask them one question, ‘WHAT ARE YOU THINKING WITH THESE RIDICULOUS NAMES???” Anyhow, according to Microsoft, Dynamics Live is a community built around financial professionals.

Now even though I cannot even balance my checkbook, I went ninja and signed up and entered the community. Being that it is Microsoft, I started with mixed feelings, but I have to tell you that for certain areas I was pretty impressed. They really built in a number of social features into this product, most notably, a tagging system for all articles, posts, etc and the ability to search via a tag cloud for anything and everything. They also have an interesting “digg like” rating system for most popular posts as well as discussion boards with operators standing by for feedback and thoughts.

My only issue with the product is the same issue I have with most every product of Microsoft, which is the customer experience. I never have understood why Microsoft does not focus more on the user experience in everything they do. Microsoft architected and built this community like they build everything else; how they think it should be built without understanding who the target audience is and how they like to work.

I believe this is going to be the challenge for many of the players that are jumping into the community arena. They need to understand that no matter if you have the greatest back end technology in the world, if no-one enjoys and accomplishes tasks by using it, it has absolutely no value. This is where I differ with a number of posts I have read recently, I do not believe the technology will be deciding factor on who wins and who loses these community races. It will be the companies that best integrate and understands their target audience and delivers that experience online will be the last ones standing.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MySpace, Microsoft Dynamics Live, community

I came home last night and sitting on my front step of my house were two new, hot of the presses, phone books. I immediately picked them up and tossed them into my recycling bin. I cannot tell you how long it has been since I have used a phone book of any kind and it got me thinking if people actually still use these things?

I began digging on the net and found a couple of recent studies that showed the phone book usage has definitely dropped in recent years, but people 45 and older still use the phone book on a somewhat “regular” basis. They did not really define what regular was cause I find it hard to believe that anyone uses a phone book on any kind of regular basis, but that is just me.

These studies I found concluded that the major reason for that particular age group still using the phone book is because they are not as computer savvy and feel more comfortable with the phone book. Makes sense yes, but I think there is another point to look at. Whether a person is computer and internet savvy is not the major issue here. It is about the experience a user has. Whether they feel comfortable and find what they are looking for quick and easy.

I do not believe that any of the online yellow pages nor local search has really hit any critical mass when it comes to giving users a great customer experience. It got me thinking, how many millions of dollars does it cost these companies to create, print and ship all these paper phone books all across the country? If one of these companies took a third of that cost and focused on developing a true experience on the web, how many millions of dollars could they save in the future by not having to print and deliver all these books?

Technorati Tags: customer experience

I have been meaning to post this video I saw a couple of weeks ago. Even though I am not a huge Microsoft fan, I believe over the last couple of years Sony has shown themselves to be the most arrogant company I have ever seen. They have been reckless with their products, their services and shown absolutely no consideration for the people most important to them, their customers. Sony, I believe that you have totally killed your brand.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Sony, brand