Viral Brand Damage Limitation

Businesses and organisations who care about their brands take a number of steps to develop their brands and their reputation. They usually spend a lot of time, money and energy on design, registrations and promotion. Many go on to survey their audience to ensure that their brands are recognised and are associated with the intended image.

In this world of social media, just as it is feasible for ingenious brand owners to promote their brand using the power of the internet and the social media, so it is now entirely feasible for your reputation to be damaged by the same social media. This why Tweets about certain brands will solicit a fast reaction and a correction. A recent set of Tweets on Asda’s on-line store shows that they not only monitor Twitter for their brand, but take pro-active steps to contact people and to ensure satisfaction. NHS-Direct also monitor Twitter for negative comments and make an attempt to fix things – although a simple Twitter reply with a link to a generic comment web-page is not in the same league as Asda’s recent reaction. Similarly, other brand owners seem to be totally oblivious to the power of the web, including forums and Twitter.

If you type “Land-Rover Discovery 3” into Google and then go to the second site in the natural listings (www.disco3.co.uk/forum/) you will find a forum which, on 4th January 2010, included 1077 posts on faults and fixes for the Discovery 3 model and 398 posts in the same category on the recently launched Discovery 4 model. It may be that not all of these represent manufacturing faults, but would you buy an expensive car after reading this lot?

My point is simple. It is now a lot more important for brand-owners to be sensitive to customer opinions. They may conduct surveys; they may take the feedback from those surveys seriously. But, how many brand owners actively seek out dissatisfied customers? These are the dissatisfied customers who find it so easy to publish faults and foibles to the global internet audience.
People usually vote with their feet – and change to an alternative brand if they are unhappy. Unfortunately, some of our purchases fall in to the “too expensive to dump it and move on” category – especially in a recession. So we are forced to stick with brands we are unhappy with and to tell the world – damaging brands in the process.

Suggestions

• Make it your business to actively seek out unhappy customer comments in the social media world. Speak to your customers.
• Show them you care.
• Put things right – over and above the warranty if required.
  - Do this before they build a huge following who are just waiting for the next public notice of some issue or problem.
• Consider developing KPI’s on your brands appearances in social media with positive, neutral and negative comments.
• For something more structured - take a look at a post on Creating Customer Delight
• Or, read: Richard C. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company, Perseus Books, ISBN 0-201-60813-8

Skills Shortage?

2009 has been an interesting year.

One of the issues faced by many businesses, especially medium to large businesses, is a shortage of critical skills. In some cases, key skills have been reduced by cost saving programmes.

Cost saving projects often lead to roles being made redundant. Where this results in head-count reductions in support or overhead areas, the process adopted is usually viewed as the least bad option by a business struggling to shore up weak finances. However, it is possible that the result is a substantial reduction in the expertise of the business in key areas.

If these roles were truly unnecessary, they should not have been filled with people - even in good times. To cap it all, if numbers start to improve, reinstatement of the individual who has left through redundancy is tricky. You may be uncertain of the sustainability of any up-turn. Your business may have evolved to the point where you would prefer to avoid re-employing the person who left (If in doubt, take professional advice on the employment law issues).

One approach worth considering is to hire a part-time functional expert. Someone with the skills you need - but for, say, 2 days per month. Hire the right person and you will:

• Still save money
• Make best use of the unskilled / semi-skilled support people in your team
• Be able to reduce or cut the cost of this resource at short notice without worrying about the costs or complexities of UK employment law.

There are many, highly skilled, people to choose from. Make sure you verify their expertise and that their terms of business give you the control you need.

Cheaper Marketing Costs More

Talking to a marketing agency I know this morning was an education in cost wasting. My contact had just spent a whole lot of client time - much of which he cannot invoice - sorting out a file sent to him by a client. His plea "bring back professional marketers, they save me time and my clients money".
The leaders of many organisations try to save money in their marketing by not employing a marketing professional. They then ask a well meaning, enthusiastic, member of the team - with no marketing experience - to manage external agencies. The result is an unclear brief which constantly changes while the creative agency works hard to try to deliver value. The information is often passed to the agency in a format - in Publisher for example - which is very time consuming for an agency to extract into their professional systems. The final outcome often costs a lot more than was necessary.

The Solution
If you cannot write a clear brief and format information with clarity - so that your agency can deliver effectively for you, then use a part-time professional marketer to manage your marketing. The extra expense will be saved time and time again when your sub-contract providers are able to work to your real requirements and to deliver work that reinforces your brand and meets your objectives. Simples!

Missing the Marketing Opportunity

Looking at the BBC web site business pages today, my attention was drawn to an article on Compass Group and the fact that their annual profits have been boosted by cost cuts. It seemed like an excellent financial performance and I was curious to see if there was a more detailed press release on the Compass Web Site to explain their cost cutting strategy - in particular, I wanted to know how their cost cutting had been managed to ensure longer term profit growth. As we all know, it is very easy to cut costs in the short term to deliver an instant fix in the form of a profit boost. It is much harder to develop and implement a long term cost reduction strategy that is part of a wider plan to grow profitability in future years.

I was disappointed. The most recent press release on that I could find on the Compass Group UK web site was dated 22nd September and was an announcement that from October all their fresh beef will be sourced from Britain (I assume their frozen and processed beef will continue to be sourced from multiple countries - especially as the notes to editors includes a reference to the ration of fresh to frozen beef).

In marketing and brand building terms, and especially in an industry which is targeting strategic outsourcing deals, they have missed a trick. It is imperative that marketing messages are consistent and consistently applied throughout an organisation. And that includes publishing links to important financial announcements on local operating company web-sites. The group web-site has all the financials - but I had to go back to Google to find it.

In your own business, it would pay you to create a simple check list. That way, when you publish something opportunistic, you can double check for consistency across all media forms.
Now, before I hit "Publish", I had better check www.results-zone.com for consistency with this Blog posting!

Customer Delight and Differentiation

We are all constantly looking for new ways to differentiate our offering. Where most of us struggle is in trying to work out where to look for sources of differentiation that matter to our customers. And here's the thing - if your customer does not care about your new three part, chromium plated reverse flange widget and its benefits, you have wasted loads of time, effort and money.

So what now? Try asking some customers about things you care about in your products and services. Ask your customers two simple questions for each of the benefits you are investigating:

1. Rate your satisfaction if the product/ service has this feature to deliver that benefit?; and
2. Rate your satisfaction if the product did not have this feature to deliver that benefit?

Ask them to answer in one of four ways:

A) Happy;
B) Neutral (This is normal);
C) Unhappy;
D) Don’t care.

Answers - my thoughts:

• Neutral to 1 & Unhappy to 2 is a basic, taken for granted feature. Omit this to your cost.
• Don't care to 1 & to 2 - not worth the investment
• Neutral to 2 and Happy to 1 - these have the potential to create differentiation - partly because your customer did not know these were needed until they were seen.
• Happy to 1 and Unhappy to 2 - these are good things to include but are unlikely to be sources of differentiation.

For a lot more cogent information on this topic, try researching the Kano Model - there is a lot on the web and it will help you to make a difference to your offer.

Good luck!

Dig For Detail - Summarise for Action

Smart businesses regularly canvass information from their customers. Some do this as part of the account management process; others conduct a formal customer survey. You need to decide which option, or combination of options, works best for your business.

Going Formal? – Then Construct a Questionnaire

• Keep your questions simple.
• Aim to keep the questions constant – so that you can compare results over time.
• Make sure that you capture numeric information – but keep the scale to an even number so that people have to decide.
• Make sure you allow space for verbatim comments. This gives two benefits:
  - People get a chance to give you the details behind their scoring so that you get a chance to fix problems.
  - When people give you compliments, the testimonial is written already – all you need is permission to publish.
• Select a technology that is appropriate to your customers – paper or email based forms still work well. Online surveys are great for some customer groups.

Conduct the survey

• Give your customers time to respond and, if you are running a semi-annual or annual survey, issue gentle reminders.
• Consider a prize draw as an incentive to respond – you know your customers best.
• Remember, the response rate is in itself a customer comment!

Summarise the Results

• Tabulate the findings. Plot graphs of the numbers.
• Look for similarities and differences between customer types

Dig-For-Detail

• Review the results and try to understand what lies underneath the feedback you are getting.
• A team meeting could make great sense at this point.
• Go back to customers and ask for more details if required:
• If they are unhappy, it shows that you care.
• If they are happy, you can thank them for their feedback and ask permission to use it in a testimonial.

Summarise the Review

• Identify the root causes of any deficiencies.
• Create an action plan to rectify failings.
• If everything is really positive – go for the PR.

Repeat the Survey – when appropriate

• Look for trends.
• Confirm that your actions have been effective.

Plan, Focus, Results

Busy people often struggle to be effective. Their energy and drive works against them because they attempt to solve every issue by working harder. By working longer hours. In the extreme, their energy and drive conspire to make them ineffective.

Plan
Smart people plan their time and mentor their team to plan effectively. By planning effectively, people find it easier to avoid the distraction trap and to focus their time on the tasks and initiatives which are aligned to the business goals. The creation of an effective operating plan, which is derived from a complete and honest strategic plan which, in turn, is aligned to the business vision and goals is a straightforward task that many intelligent senior managers and directors manage to avoid. With an effective plan, it becomes possible to focus limited resources on to the highest priority tasks and to ensure that the scarcest resources are being managed to deliver maximum effect.

Focus
The management art of keeping the team on track. Focus will ensure that people are working on the agreed priorities so that there are no surprises at the review meetings. The objectivity which is required to ensure that the review process works properly can on occasions be elusive. This is especially true if the focus is allowed to shift from facts and data (usually the basis of the plan you spent so much time writing and agreeing) to the emotions and opinions that arise from assumption and a complete lack of detachment.

Results
If you create a realistic and complete plan and then focus your team on working to that plan, the results will follow.

Objective Review
If you struggle to create a review process which includes the objectivity and detachment from the day-to-day struggle, consider hiring an external advisor. It may cost a lot less than you expect to engage a non-executive director (or business manager if you prefer) who is able to help the whole team to focus on the data. Hire the right help, and you will see the improvement in the performance of the management team in a number of areas.