Category: Blog

Sometimes a win for someone is a fail for someone else. When the Michigan Wolverines took on the Rutgers Scarlet Knights the game, if you can call it that, was a beatdown. Michigan won 78-0. This was not a small school or anything, this was a conference opponent, and Rutgers was at home. But that win for Michigan was a loss from one local business:

This turned into two fails for Ruth’s Chris.

1. They were about to lose a lot of money. A promotion that sounded like a good idea turned out to be extremely costly. As one Facebook commentator said:
   
2. They backed down. Either through initial error or fear Ruth’s Chris revised the post during the game to limit the promotion to 50% off. This is where the real fail came. This is was not missed by the social media world at large. This was a trending topic around the US this weekend. There was lots of backlash on the internet. 
   Before your next promotion, be sure to count the cost and double check the rules. This could have been a huge win if they had owned their mistake and took advantage of it promotionally. They could have achieved this by doing news stories and possibly inviting the team for dinner. You could have made a video about the craziness of the next week as you honored the offer. This could have been a feel-good story, instead there are lots of angry customers.

I believe every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to make a stark raving fan. Stark raving fans are really good for business and marketing. Referrals and good word of mouth are the most powerful form of marketing. Therefore taking care of customers should be a top priority in any business. This is especially true when something has gone wrong or a customer has an odd request. Is the customer always right? No. But we should help them be right as often as possible.

After I published my review of “Customers For Life” a friend(Randy Moffett) mentioned that he had a great customer service book that I should check out. “Customer Love” is a series of short vignettes of customer service success stories. These stories are between 1-3 pages long and come from a large variety of businesses.

One of the more powerful thoughts about this book is: “Customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude.” To help your team see that everyone is in the customer satisfaction business is huge. Having an entire team empowered and ready to serve the customer is a great way to set yourself apart from the competition.

If you are in a leadership position this might be a great book to use almost as a ‘devotional’ from the team. It might be wise at staff meetings to take time and share one of the short stories from this book.  Another strength of the book is the variety of industries that it covers. It might give you a few good ideas to try and implement with your team.

This is a great coffee table book, bookshelf, or a waiting area book. It is hardcover and brightly covered. Short enough to get engaged quickly but with short bits of info so it is easy to put down.

But my favorite customer service book is still Customers for Life. The big difference between these two is that Customers For Life is about one man’s business and how he ran it, the view is from the inside. Customer Love is written from the outside and some of the stories are even sourced from others work, like Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless.

For what you can buy this book for on Amazon it is worth it. Use it as short stories with your team or anecdotes with your peer group. But I would also take the time to read Customers For Life and read in more detail about how a man led his company to be a customer service powerhouse.

Last week we talked about product and now we move to price. As a small business owner, the hardest thing I ever do is price my product. Pricing is difficult because you are trying to balance a few things: costs, profit, and customers.

1. Costs: If you are doing something as a hobby, it might be better to not count the costs of making your product. It is absolutely fine to do something on the side and do it for fun. Maybe that is knitting or photography. But if you ever want to grow it into a business, you must start accounting for costs sooner than later. Some businesses like a restaurant have lots of costs, product, labor, housing. Some businesses like mine have very few costs.

   The cost I most often see business owners ignore is his/her labor. If you make a widget and sell it for fun, counting your time is not essential. If you want to make it into a business, you should start checking your time. You will probably have more time in a product than you think and it may turn your hourly rate per product is in the few cents.

2. Profit: One of the goals of pricing is to maximize profit. A question to ask is: How much can I charge? Making a profit is a good thing but the amount of profit has a lot to do with what you are selling and how. I would suggest looking for industry standards to look at what profit margins are being generated by your competitors. But with a higher profit margin comes benefits like being able to retain talent and keep your business running smoothly. One of the biggest factors in deciding profit should be the next point.
3. Customers: How many customers do you want? Something to think about when considering pricing is how many customers do you want to work with at a time. Here are two examples: Little Caesars sells lots of pizza at a razor thin price model. A local high-end pizza shop sells a lot fewer pizzas but charge a lot more and should have a much higher profit margin. Which end of the spectrum do you want to be on? You can sell Lexuses or you can sell Fords and the volume is going to be very different but when you do that, you need to account for your profit margin. Very few people are like Apple and sell a nearly ubiquitous product and have giant profit margins.

There is a lot more to say about pricing but there are better people than me to talk about it. One source is the Businessology show, this episode in particular talks about Value Pricing.

Marketers can help you determine pricing with surveys and customer feedback. But we can also be a cost to account for in your pricing. Pricing is one of the things that should be constantly evaluated and changed based on the current situation of demand and costs.

Read on Product here. 

Promotion (coming soon)

Place (coming soon)

This week we kick-off a little marketing 101. The 4 P’s of marketing is a pretty common notion and they are: product, price, promotion, place. Many times people want to limit marketing down to just promotion but that would be selling marketing short. Phil might make the finest widgets in the world but if the customer doesn’t understand that and can’t find them, he is going to have a hard time staying in business.

This week we are going to breakdown product.

I can’t help you if you do not have a good product to sell. The product/service that you offer has to be of good quality or no one will buy it. If we went ahead and did the marketing and sold that bad product, the consequences could be worse than the benefit of the few you would sell. People could return them or spread bad word of mouth which could kill your chances of succeeding, potentially even if you fixed your offering.

A good marketing partner will help you diagnose how to improve your product/service. Now this might be difficult with some things that are more technically challenging. This is not to say that a marketer is an expert in your field, but most marketers are quick learners and bring a outsiders perspective to your business model. They do not bring the burden of knowledge to your business and can look on your offering with fresh eyes.

But keep in mind that the actual product/service is not all that there is to the product category. The customer experience of getting that product is also very important to how good a product is. This is an area where a marketer can really help you. An outsiders perspective is extremely valuable in assessing how a customers experience might be coming across.

Additionally, marketers may be able to help you improve your product by conducting focus groups or customer interviews. Who better to talk about how to improve your offering by talking to the people who buy it or the people you want to sell it to! These groups can help you to test your assumptions verse the market which can pay dividends in the short and long term.

Product is the first on the list of 4 P’s because it is the most foundational. Next week we will be back with the second P: Price.

This month I want to draw attention to a traditional media outlet using new media to create a win for its brand. The tv network, FX, has always been a bit edgy but I think this was a really smart play for connecting with this program’s target audience.

Atlanta is a new series on FX headlined and created by Troy Barnes, I mean, Childish Gambino, I mean Donald Glover. The target market for this is millennials and younger and you can see this come out in how they target the promotion. I do not have cable but this has been promoted really well all over the internet to my demographic.

The bigger point I want to show here is that they are using free things to drive people to a paid product, which will exist only with a purchased avenue. You can watch it on their app but you have to login with a cable/satellite account. Early reports look promising for Atlanta and FX.

How did they do it?

First, they put out lots of teasers. Short teasers, longer teasers that help get people interested.

Second, they put the first episode online, even straight on Facebook and Youtube, without ads, to get people to see it. What a move! They know that the lifetime value of a viewer is more important than that one episode. I think the traffic on the Facebook post is pretty amazing:

The Atlanta page boasts almost 200k likes but look at the traffic! 34k shares, and it has more like than shares. There is no contest here to generate shares, people like the content/ were excited about the content enough that they shared it. A lot. Additionally look at those 1.4mil views. We know that Facebook views are not the best stat to judge success by but it’s a pretty impressive number. It also has nearly 1 million views on Youtube.

It also did pretty well on the TV ratings near the top of the tv charts for that Tuesday night. But I do not think those include the online stats, which is where it is prone to succeed.

People are going to be motivated to either go and watch it on cable or possibly buy it on iTunes for a few dollars per episode. At the time of writing (Saturday evening) it is number 5 on the iTunes video store

This plan brings in some thought processes like are discussed in the FREE book. They gave this away, to help create secondary sales in other places. We probably won’t ever know the exact details of its success but I think we will know when/if it is renewed for a second season.

But this use of social media is a win.

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