Marketing Memos

By “branding support” I am not suggesting that one apply a red-hot iron with rancher’s logo to the flesh of a technical support representative.  However, having worked ranch when I was a kid, and having recently experienced tech support, the thought has a certain appeal.

Your brand is created with every buyer interaction.  Some interactions occur in advertising.  Others occur between buyers and cut you out of the interaction loop.  The rest occur whenever your buyers visits your company, be it your web site, your sales office, or your support department.

The letter can destroy you.

Not long ago, Dell was flagging.  Part of this was a change in the market which they failed to anticipate and were also slow in responding.  Yet a good part of their fall from prominence was due to ill-advised shifting of technical support (something that had been a glowing aspect of Dell’s brand) to under-trained staff in India.  Many formerly loyal Dell customers became openly antagonistic, and this negative brand image was communicated from customer to customer.

Support as a brand touch point came sharply into focus for me last week as I encountered two completely opposite examples of customer service, or lack thereof.  In the case of Comcast, they tarnished an already inferior brand through indifferent and idiotic “support.”  Amazon, on the other hand was so superb in execution that their already strong brand became more so.

Comcast – casting doubts about their sanity

For someone in the high tech business, I’m a technology laggard.  There is not a single HD-TV in my home.  Needing to replace a failing low def tube, and deciding I might as well start down the HD highway, I emailed Comcast support with a simple question:  since I have to use one of your set top boxes to get HD, tell me which box(es) will you provide in my area so I can buy the best TV to use with it.

Eleven emails later …

The sundry exchanges could be considered comical were they not aggravating.  The first response said “I understand that you would want to know more about HD” and then provided a URL to Comcast advertising.  Sorry Kandarpa, not even close.  Interestingly, a different support agent who had the entire preceding email thread and saw my reaction to this odd substitute for “support”, gave exactly the same answer.

One fellow bordered on helpful, sending a list of links to their many different set top boxes, but did not identify the one used in my area (they are different in different areas because Comcast is rolling out different services on different schedules to different regions).  The rest of the emails resulted in a continuing lack of enlightenment until I said that I would document the email exchange for Comcast’s VP of marketing.  That threat (yes, threatening Comcast is about the only alternative) got a senior support slacker with two of more functioning dendra to clearly state that Comcast technical support had no way to know what set top boxes were issued by any office.  Period.

I worry about company that provides data services but cannot make data available to their own support teams.

One can (and I would) argue that such sloppy support can only come from a monopoly, which describes any municipal franchise.  Amazon, always mindful that they have no such government protection, goes further to protect their brand and service their customers.

Amazon – amazing affection

In the same week that Comcast was cascading down the canyon of doom (AT&T and possibly Google will soon run fiber to the premises here), I ordered a new cell phone from Amazon.  This surprised everyone given that I have been hauling the same smart phone the nearly a decade.  Being the frugal descendants of Scotts, I naturally opted for the cheapest shipping option available (free), but was surprised the next day when Amazon said the in-stock handset wouldn’t even leave their warehouse for five days.  I popped them an email and noted that out of simple curiosity I wonder why the delay.

Amazon sent a single, coherent, informative email about the mechanics of their order fulfillment system, apologized for my confusion, and upgraded me at no cost for two-day shipment to make sure I remained satisfied with Amazon.

Contrast the two – Comcast and Amazon.  The former clearly didn’t care enough to even try to answer a simple inquiry.  The later, having a more complex question to answer did so and then, at their expense, did something unexpected and downright endearing.  Comcast diluted their brand by forcing a soon former customer to battle their ineptitude.  Amazon hugged me into submission.

The marketing message is that you brand is impacted at every interaction.  Giving people reasons to dislike doing business with you is the pump primer for churn.  Hurry up AT&T and Google … you have a paying customer waiting on you.

Now, if Amazon started providing internet services to the home …

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Short is sweet.

No, this is not another diatribe on compact market messages, though that lesson is well worth repeating.  Where sweet and short nicely collide is in the sales cycle.  The shorter the cycle, the sooner the revenue, the happier the stockholder and the fatter your bonus check.

Marketers know that social media is becoming an intrinsic, if not superior, tool for finding and landing customers.  What has not been well quantified is the degree to which social media helps.  The folks over at the Software and Information Industry Association, where I am a perpetual CODiE judge, recently presented some data that indicates how and which social media may be helpful in shortening the sales cycle (click the graphic for one large enough to read).

The blue bars represent sales closing in less than 90 days, and the gray bars sales lasting more than 90 days.  Where you see a significant height difference are those tools that accelerate sales (huge caution – the survey size was small, so use several grains of sodium chloride when ingesting this snack).  We see that marketing mavens believe that videos, Facebook and Twitter are significantly better at getting people to part with cash faster than any other mode.

The problem is that each serves a different purpose.  Thus you may need to use all three to get great sales close speed.

Video: Videos are best at communicating conceptual information.  From product value gestalts to detailed product functionality reviews, videos provide a consistent, reusable, self-guiding system for helping people discover what they need to know about your products.  The problem is that you never will be James Cameron, and if you direct anything bigger than an elementary school play, your lack of chops will show.  Frankly, most product videos stink because they try too little or too much, and at the wrong point in the education cycle.  It is better to make a series of small videos that guide the viewer from concept to functional details, and let the videos self-qualify the viewer in the process.

Facebook: The first authentic borg may be Facebook.  When old ladies actively use a web site for sharing videos of their grandchildren, swapping recipes, and joining the George Clooney fan club, then it is all encompassing.  For marketers, community hubs are for building communities.  Like her or loath her, Sara Palin’s 1,460,713 Facebook followers (as of this afternoon) connect directly to the product that is Palin.  Facebook is not a sales tool, but by assembling a community, increasing the credibility and approachability of a brand, you ease resistance to a sale and speed the sales cycle.

Twitter: Twitter is triage.  Though there are limited options for promotion on Twitter (Dell being good at it) it is more for management of a brand.  The internet has a habit of growing cojones on people, even women.  They speak their minds and Twitter provides people an instant outlet.  Twitter is best used to identify and coddle malcontents, and to reward loyalists.  It is also good for finding people asking key questions about your products and addressing those questions as instantly as possible, and for their friends and followers to see your very personal attentiveness and answers.

For marketing executives, these facts create both opportunities and hemorrhoids.  Anything that shortens sales cycles is a valuable tool.  However, unlike advertising, each requires a human touch, and with the exception of videos, requires hourly participation.  More work, more manpower, more costs.  If you are creating a new market and you need to dominate it so thoroughly that competitors never prosper (the SalesForce.com and Success Factors approach), social media is a must.  By compressing the sales cycle (or the ‘buy cycle’ when looked at creatively) you block competitors by saturating the market as quickly as possible.

That’s inequitable, and in business that is a Good Thing.

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I’m hoping for antisocial media.  I can see how to make a buck off of that.

Meanwhile, social media continues to gain dominance in marketing, and for good reason.  Humans, and even politicians, are social animals.  We commune for pleasure, profit and procreation (which pretty much describes a day in the life of Eliot Sprtizer).  Even the most sterile of pursuits requires some social aspect.  Every poor blogger, alone in his office, hammers out prose in order to asynchronously connect with other humans.

Business-to-business (B2B) activities are thus social interactions.  Oracle commits social acts when it interacts with other enterprises, aside from the select few it eats.  Thus social media should be a component of B2B. The oddest aspect of B2B social media concerns who in the relationship needs to socialize and why.  The failure to think through these two questions have led to various B2B social media catastrophes including most of the old executive blogs at Sun Micro.

Relationships, regardless of how tenuous, are the heart of social media.  Your B2B worries center on buyers, suppliers and thought leaders.  These are the primary external groups who are influenced by you and your competitors and thus the ones to which social media is important.

Just ask Oracle’s 28,918 Facebook fans.

When stripped bare, social media for business is mainly about branding.  You need people to perceive your company and products in a particular way.  Social media offers the ability to communicate brand both directly and personally.  The personal aspect is what creates an emotional connection with a human (politicians, having no souls, have no emotions).  B2B social networking is mainly about the communication, amplification or defense of your brand.

Brand communication: At the risk of repeating myself … again … if you do not define and consciously communicate your brand, the market will, and the market is unkind.  Social media’s personal touch gives tremendous opportunity for communicating brands.  Sadly most companies treat the opportunity as advertising, which some people perceive as an antisocial assault (ever notice the advertising you remember most are those that entertain and make you feel).  Any employee (including the CEO) who communicates in social media needs to do so only after reciting your internal brand statement ten times.  Once the brand is reloaded into memory, any social media communication will reflect that brand.

Brand amplification: Often members of an audience will correctly state your brand.  Such acts deserve acknowledgement, appreciation and rephrasing what the other person said with your specific branding words.  Doing so clarifies and amplifies your brand in public places.

Brand defense: Other folks are not as kind, and may have many nasty things to say about your products, your company and maybe even your mama.  Left unchecked, these can escalate into a negative brand image.  Some companies are proactive, and upon seeing a negative comment help the person to resolve their problem or explain why it has to be.  Other companies (most notably the self-destructing Intuit) either ignore community outrage, or worse yet try to censor negative branding.  Social media has to be treated as an opportunity to connect.  As you would with friends or family, treat the other person well.

The hard part about B2B social networking is finding or establishing relevant places to participate.  Proactive companies create social media spaces, be it a Facebook fan page, a public forum based around their market or segment, or even private executive panels.  Many marketing dilatants hijacked these sites for promotional purposes, and rapidly killed the value originally promised.  In more mature markets where social media arose from the masses (such as within trade or technical interest groups), enterprises have joined as members.

The take-away is that your suppliers and your buyers are people and need to be treated as such.  Online social media is merely a rapid extension of normal social interaction.  Since social media is global, asynchronous and everlasting, even B2B businesses need to incorporate it into their overall marketing plan.  Just understand that social does not mean sales, but it does mean social.

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