Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Recently Netflix in the US changed how their business model works, and in the aftermath they have experienced a steady stream of abuse in the media (here, here, here, and you get the idea), and significant losses in share price. The noise is mainly the sucking sound made by tribes of angry subscribers leaving after price hikes and planned changes to the service (including splitting the service into two separate companies).

What’s interesting about all the hullabaloo, is that some very real principles about what customer service has become are starting to be codified, using the company’s missteps as object lessons of what not to do.

1. Get inside your customer’s heads when it comes to value. You have to do your homework to understand how the price-value equation works for your customers.  Just because there is a way for your planned changes to drop the price for one element of your service, doesn’t mean that your customers view your service that way. It’s like the opposite of how bundling works - you can charge more for bundled services as long as the customer sees a discount hiding in there.  By unbundling their products, NF gave their customers the reverse stress of seeing a full-price paid for each service, rather than a deal.

2. Realize that your best customers don’t care about your business model. It may be obvious to you why you’re making changes to your service or structure, but keep in mind that users see you (hopefully) as a solution to a problem that they have, not an enterprise with a long-range plan.  If you simply have to make a change, then be prepared to show the users how it benefits them directly, not just why it’s good for you.

3. Don’t underestimate the need for continuity amongst your users. Understand that if you’ve done your job right, then your customers feel that THEY own your brand, not the other way around.  There are so many great examples of how angry people can get in this regard: Gap’s logo gaffe, recent Facebook changes, and the list goes on and on.  It’s not that you can’t ever change things successfully, but you have to be sensitive to how it impacts your user community.

4. If (or more likely, _when_) you have to apologize, make sure that you sound humble. It can be grating to read an apology that reads defensive and seems to imply that the reader doesn’t ‘get it’.  Try to sound more like you’ve learned something, rather than you’ve been misunderstood.

Have you learned any other painful nuggets of wisdom regarding customer service for your product or service?

Photo: David Armano, on Flickr

Now for something completely different. The beauty of this just jumped out at me. Had to share.

TOKYO SLO-MODE from alex lee on Vimeo.

Seen on Gerald’s FB stream.

Download the latest Cultural Fuel Trend Report August 2011

Found a great article that reminds us of how there are side effects of our use of digital technologies, or the social web. Not just when it comes to privacy issues, but actually our growth as human beings.

No question, the web is probably the most amazing thing ever. But, in our quest to tailor everything to our needs - thanks to the great feedback mechanism that is the web - we forget that we lose out on the positive side of randomness and “uncustomizability”. Among other things, creative ideas, in fact, also grow amidst randomness. Just imagine being in a brainstorm with only the people that fit your social media profile. It would be a horrible brainstorm. Removing randomness, and allow preselection, and planning for everything that might suit our imagined needs also lets us become self-fulfilling prophecies, if not caricatures of ourselves.

Dalton Conley, op-ed contributer to the NYT, and dean of social sciences at New York University, makes this a topic using an example of his, when he met his first roommate in college.

I am sad that most of my students will not experience what I did back when Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers. While the Internet has made it easy to reconnect with the lost Tonys of our lives, it has made it a lot more difficult to meet them in the first place, by taking a lot of randomness out of life. We tend to value order and control over randomness, but when we lose randomness, we also lose serendipity.

Read it the whole thing here.

Via Jeff Brooks

While Apple is busy planning its new grandiose headquarter offices in Cupertino and celebrating its recent successes, some voices have words of admonishment. Using the example of the lack of success of the iAd platform, Brandt Dainow points out:

The point is Apple runs a restricted, tightly controlled environment in a world that loves the free market. History has shown us, over and over again, that free markets always win out over closed ones.

A rule, that most people seem to have forgotten when it comes to Apple. So far the exceptional innovation culture at Apple has delivered products that people finally really wanted, more or less making people forget that they are buying into a closed system.

Now, Apple is protecting questionable aspects of their innovations, such as the rounded corners on iDevices by filing patent law suits. Is this a sign of having reached their innovation plateau, or is it just good business practice?

Granted, there are many more companies that should worry about their state of innovation than Apple, but, still, in a sense, Apple has reached a plateau that may require a look at its purpose beyond having revolutionized the consumer electronics space. With having proven they can, what is the next thing we can expect from Apple? I doubt creating more types of iDevices or living from iOS updates is the topic here. Some say, in the midterm, Apple could deal with the much neglected enterprise and B2B markets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean new revolutionary innovation on the scale we have witnessed with the introduction of iPhone and iPad.

And maybe, just maybe, with whatever the “next thing” is for Apple, it will have to be a bit more open.

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared from This Is It on Vimeo.

wundervoll film by collective
(danke christian)

Check out this lovely TED Talk Julian Treasure on 5 ways to listen better.  It’s much more than just a typical “You should listen actively”-type talk.  It’s more about how we develop real understanding with each other and the world around us.

He discusses the lack of listening skills that have plagued humankind, practically from the invention of writing, and also talks about some pretty magical ways to listen better in your everyday life.  I was reminded of the You Are Listening To Los Angeles site we featured here a while ago.

Julian talks about listening positions, which planners should be well acquainted with, where you shift the attitude of what you’re listening to or the filters you’re receiving the information through from active to passive, from being critical to being empathic, from in or out of your cultural norms.  It’s a great technique to get conscious about the filters and ‘move to different positions’, i.e., develop your understanding of the topic or conversation in different ways.

What caught my attention, however, was the section where he talks about listening for leaders, teachers, spouses, parents or friends.  He uses “Rasa”, the sanskrit word for essence or juice, as an acronym for:

Receive - pay attention

Appreciate - show that you are engaged

Summarize - make sure you understood

Ask - expand your knowledge

I would change the last one to Ask/Act - and encourage marketers to examine their actions and activities to see if they are following through to truly expand knowledge together.

Are you consciously embracing listening?  Are your actions full of Rasa?

If you’ve tried to follow all the hype about Google+, you were probably hard-pressed to try and read all the blog posts and articles. There are just too many. But what was striking about the articles was their sameness. 90% of them seem to be about the future not about the now. Little was imparted about what to do with G+, most of them where rants about what G+ isn’t or about what it should be, or about what it could be, and of course about who will win in the SN wars. The one exception I came across was an article by Thomas Hawk about how to make G+ work for you as a photographer. Other than that, I witnessed the usual hype wave, where usual suspects of social ninjas can’t help themselves and make prognostications to leave a mark, opinion-wise, so they get a share of the voice.

The problem with that isn’t the voices or prognostications, it’s that we so easily get swept away by it that we create a reality about something in our heads that we haven’t actually experienced yet ourselves. We take the time to read all this stuff, but have little time to go and innovate and experiment.

It’s been a few weeks of excitement and tizzy and dilly-dallying. Fine. Let’s move on now and speak about experience insights, experimentation and collaborative best thinking on a new platform, not the next social media weather report. There is nothing more annoying in a playground than the annoying descriptiveness of some authority figure telling us how things are, should be, could be. It stifles application and experimentation.

Alan Wolk, borrowing metaphorically from his grandmothers cookbook, makes a great point in his blog Toad Stool

What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.

You couldn’t be more right, and thanks for the reminder what this is supposed to be about!

Oh my, some brands just can’t help themselves, can they? I mean it’s not like you need a social media guru or digital ninja to tell you this: you shouldn’t pretend to wanna have a conversation with your brand’s fans if you can’t stomach criticism.

But yet, this is what keeps happening. This time with Versace. Versace closed down posting functionality of for their 500K fans after criticism about sandblasting their jeans was voiced because it is done manually by laborers in poor countries and the sand gets in their lungs.

What I find particularly spicy about this is that this kind of reaction is that it isn’t about just shutting down or moderating fans bickering or complaining about products or styles.

This is about shutting down a worthy cause and request people have with a brand they actually would love to be able continue to like. Please take these folks to a “How to avoid PR nightmares 101″ night class somewhere.

Yeah, it’s been a slow month on the blog here. I was on paternity leave (yes, we do take them in Europe). So, funnily enough, I just have some parenting trends to report on.

First off, ever since that “Go to F*** to Sleep” book came out, everyone’s in a tizzy. In Germany, STERN magazine caught their cue and made a big deal about how research shows that kids really don’t want perfect parents. Really? Thanks for being Prussian about it, but it’s not like you ever have the option to get perfect parents, so here’s toasting to stating the obvious.

However, being a new parent myself, I can’t say a little pressure release wouldn’t help. Is our society bent on providing perfection to mitigate risk for our kids? Yeah. Apart from the whole notion being an impossible endeavor perpetuating mishigas in the first place - it also isn’t healthy. Learning from mistakes is what makes great individuals stand out. Not that this should give parents a wildcard for abandoning their role decreed by nature - but it calls for another book called “Parents? Just f****** relax”. For, as many things you are trying to do right (as you should), just as many will go “wrong”.

Now, if you have any business with brands in the toddler, kids, adolescent area, this means that you could provide some relief for parents as opposed to creating more tasks and reminders for parents to do their jobs. Yet this is what most brands do, admonishing already stressed out, already caring people to go ‘the extra mile’. Go easy on the “solutions” you might have for parents. Provide peace of mind instead. Rest assured, parents are still gonna worry enough about their offspring no matter what you do to give them 5 minutes off.

All of this is encapsulated amazingly well - and quite subliminally clear - when you listen to Werner Herzog read the oh so famed book.

Thanks to Ninja and Sung for the parental inspiration.