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

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Check out Jeanne Bliss’s article “Shedding legacy practices is key to building great customer experiences” over on RetailCustomerExperience.com.  It’s a great read, and highlights a key strategy that smart marketers embrace: You can’t do things the same way you always have and expect innovation to “just happen.”  You have to be willing to walk away from how things have historically been done, and express your organization’s purpose in the most real way you can, no matter how differently that action requires you to behave.

She outlines a great example of how banking is an industry ripe for opportunity for smart organizations to reinvent customer experiences, and really impress customers. Banks that don’t challenge or change business-as-usual practices can’t differentiate themselves in the marketplace. It’s not hard to come up with a few other industries that could use a rethinking of the customer experience - just think back to the last time a friend asked to ‘vent’ about their experience at an airport, hotel, restaurant, - you name it.

I especially like that she demonstrated that one of the biggest factors in crappy customer experience is a lack of ‘clarity of purpose’ - which is a completely HumanKind view about addressing customer needs.  She advises that clarity of purpose “can unleash the organization’s ability across silos — to make decisions guided by its purpose, its promise.”  This point makes strong intuitive sense, especially when you think about how viscerally the entire enterprise has to embrace a vision for it to be executed consistently across the company.  That’s what we mean when we talk about a brand’s purpose being single-minded - it has to be basic, clear and powerful enough that everyone can embrace it, no matter which department they’re in.

And lest we not be willing to eat our own dog food, Michael Gass over on Fuel Lines writes about how the world continues to rapidly evolve for agencies - and it’s a rare agency working today that doesn’t realize the critical need for shaking things up to stay relevant.  That said, there is not always a clear purpose that the organization can rally behind.

Check out her article, and here’s the interview with CEO Ray Davis where he explains his decision to change Umpqua’s purpose:

So the questions are: What sacred cows do you need to slay in your business, and how can you be disruptive about ‘how things have always been done’?

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Recently, I’ve come across some articles about the ad industry having a sort of midlife-crisis. This is an interesting notion, as this would premise that advertising as such has a natural life that has to come to an end at some point. And after so many people already having screamed “Advertising is dead,” I am now confused it isn’t. It’s just a mid-life crisis? Folks, get our vital signs right! Also, to follow the metaphor, what exactly is the proverbial “Porsche” in Advertising’s “mid-life crisis”?

Joking aside, just 2 weeks ago Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung painted a critical picture of the industry and mentioned that ad professionals have hard time reinventing themselves and their business model.

Just like a balding 45 year old in a track-suit with disposable income looking for a souped-up convertible to feel better about himself, advertising lacks purpose.

Today, I read Warren Berger’s take on the Bogusky situation “Maybe the Midlife Crisis Isn’t Bogusky’s?“.  Being American and a bit less cynical that his German counterpart, and using the crisis as an opportunity, Warren states that agency professionals (just like Bogusky, but without the massive payout) have been looking for deeper social meaning and context for their work ever since digital technologies have put public opinion (and advertising itself) in the hands of the people. But more interestingly, Berger also makes some nice observations that in fact remind us what the real story is:

The second part of the story suggests to me that some client companies are perhaps still a bit thin-skinned when it comes to having any kind of candid discussion about serious issues. Which in turn suggests that these companies are living in the past — in a pre-social networking era when they could actually still control the public debate.

Ok. To anyone working in an ad agency, this is a pretty shared (even though somewhat of a subjective) sentiment; still, thanks for saying it on Adweek, Warren! And, by the way, this answers my previous question of what the “Porsche” is in the “advertising mid-life crisis”: Affording yourself the irresponsible, ineffective and inefficient luxury of lolly-gagging around when it comes to changing your business model, dragging your heels on changing your creative product and pretending you still live in a brand era. However, I would say this is still true for clients and agencies alike. Dependency on short-term quarterly planning, lack of deeply thought-out foresight and interupted implementation of long-term vision apparently makes it hard to think about a more efficient, unsexy hybrid car when you can still afford the 911. You won’t be able to afford the gas in a couple of years, but hey, »Après nous le déluge«.

Hence, Warren continues to point out that the ad agency’s deliverables should change: product design, launching community initiatives, revising corporate policies, etc.

Or, as we would tell our clients: We want to help you doing things, instead of just saying things. Things that create value exchange, not messaging.

For that to happen though, the role and creative product of agencies have to change. And right now, it’s a a bit of a chicken or egg problem: a) Agency leaders have to really put their money where their mouth is, and enable their shops to actually deliver a creative product that does things with people and instead of milking a defunct business model of creating messages, while b) clients have to become more confident in matters of understanding true human behavior and consequently need to start paying their agency partners for creating purpose-driven initiatives that create a qualitative difference in people’s lives. Result of this catch-22: if agencies don’t offer it, clients can’t buy it. If clients don’t buy it, agencies can’t build those competencies.

So instead of wondering what’s first, chicken or egg, all parties should focus on the chick everyone has been talking about hatching: people-driven brands that have a human purpose, not a promise. Experiences that are authentic, not tagged-on target-audience sentiments that muddy a brand’s expression more than enable a true value exchange. If both clients and agencies came together on this simple observation, Warren’s finishing paragraph would actually not be that utopian:

It might even allow the ad agency to claim some of the moral high ground as it plays a greater role in guiding companies to do the right thing — not just for themselves, but also for the world at large. Is that an overly ambitious and idealistic vision of the future of ad agencies? Maybe. But hey, when you’re having a midlife crisis, you’re allowed to dream big.

Damn right you are. It’s what you signed up for.

In fact, there are enough examples of behavior-based and purpose-driven brands out there that show it’s not utopian to steer clear of a type of cookie-cutter advertising that is either crass exhibitionsm or bland commercialism or teary-eyed sentimentalism, but rather enable human behavior in a way that works for brands and people alike.

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