Are people drawing their shades on your brand?

ok, this is a long set up but hang in with me...

as willy & hoover would tell you (if they could speak English), i'm in close contention for the dubious honor of world's worst cook. despite this, they continue to beg for food at the table, with varying degrees of success related, more often than not, to the level of puppy-eyes that they manage to deliver.

today, their efforts paid off with a hunk of something called "amish friendship bread."

the recipe for this bread apparently has been around for decades. it essentially involves a yeast-based starter, to which you add flour, milk, and sugar, and then you divide the mix into 4 portions. you keep one of the portions for yourself, and give the remaining 3 to your friends (hence the "friendship" in the name).

i got a starter portion from my neighbor, and, not wanting to disappoint her or develop any bad amish karma, followed the directions that left me searching for friends who i thought might actually do this as opposed to laughing hysterically and throwing the stuff away (which is what i would have done, had i received it from one of them).

a note from one came back with a comment that i thought was particularly compelling. it said, among other funny things, the following:

We have had this starter twice before, and I am always smitten with it. I vow every time that I won't let it die . . . ever. But then you end up with a freezer full of bread, 10 new lbs. and a bunch of friends who draw the shades when they see you coming with the dough.

yes, a long set up indeed, but hence the title of this post.

are your customers' friends drawing the shades when they see that dough -- your brand -- coming their way? i've mentioned before my point of view that turning customers into advocates is really the only true, sustainable way of building the virtuous cycle that delivers a strong brand. but what happens when your advocates run into challenges that keep that word-of-mouth, pass-the-bread-starter mojo from taking hold? minimally, a few things:

1) your advocates start to qualify their advocacy (as if "qualified advocacy" weren't already an oxymoron, of sorts.) if so many of their friends could have a bad experience with your brand, it must be that their positive one was a fluke. so as they go around, they'll say things like, "you know, i got a great product/service from brand x, but i heard others didn't."

2) your advocates start to lapse into neutrality. nobody wants to deliver positive word-of-mouth on a (potentially) bad brand, so often they won't say anything at all about it. if pushed, they'll go with something like, "yeah, i looked around at a bunch of different options, and this is what i ended up with. it's ok."

3) your advocates start to reverse polarity. it's hard to believe this can happen, but it does. when confronted with lots of bad examples from their community on whatever the brand in question is, the former advocate will begin looking for things that aren't yet wrong with the product/service ... but maybe all of a sudden it's not quite as good as he/she thought it would be. and when asked (and sometimes, even when not prompted), the person will say something like, "you know, i got this thing and i really regret my decision."

these conversations between friends matter more than any other element of the marketing mix. don't believe me? read andy sernovitz. read chris brogan and julien smith's "trust agents." think about times (and be honest) when your mind about something got changed, not because of something that actually happened to you but because of something somebody else said about what happened to them.

net net: don't set your advocates up to fail by delivering great experiences to a select few while you treat the rest of your target poorly. otherwise, when the advocates come calling, they'll find the shades drawn, and nobody home.



photo credit: wikipedia

remember me?

ok... am i the only one who has this problem?

you know what i'm talking about. you go to a website -- pick one, any one -- that you've been to about a thousand times, and every time where it's supposed to say, "welcome,(your name)," it says:

1 Remember me.

I've come to hate the stupid little check box. it's like there's some vast conspiracy out there that is purposely not remembering me. which wouldn't be so bad, if they hadn't led me to believe that they WOULD remember me, if i checked the little box.

from my perspective, this is one part IT ineptitude, one part poor web manners, and one part ineffective user interface all rolled into one giant nightmare of bad online brand experience.

it's made all the more annoying because, when i in fact can't remember my username or which of the 25 email addresses i might have used, let alone the same number of passwords, i take advantage of their kind offer to email me that info. and they do....and so then i KNOW they DO know who i am. i guess it's comforting, in a way, that they're not going to let me log in if they're not sure i'm me, but couldn't they do this in a way that's somehow more user-friendly?

the reason i'm asking if i'm the only one with the problem is that a google search on "remember me" turns up plenty of serps, but none related to this topic. there are the movies, the song lyrics, even the jewelry, but you gotta go to halfway down page 2 before you find this utility from cappware. but the thing is, the look and feel of this page doesn't give me that snuggly secure feeling about what they're offering. i don't like the idea of storing my passwords all in one place no matter how safe they tell me it is. and the fact that they're asking for donations makes me wonder whether or not this stuff is actually any good at all.

a couple of entries later, i see something about drupal.org , the open source content management provider, that's interesting because they're apparently offering the ability for sites to tailor the length of sessions stored on their servers. so i'm now wondering if the reason i'm not being remembered is that i simply didn't visit the sites in question frequently enough... although i have a hard time believing that, perhaps it's so. i don't think of myself as an i'net noob (proven here by my use of the term "noob") but i just didn't realize that mr. checkbox's promise of remembering me would last only so long.

perhaps we're all meant to simply go along with the flow, being ok with not being remembered, all in the interest of protecting our online identity and security of our personal info. i guess that's what i've been doing (all the while being annoyed, but not annoyed enough to actually do anything about it), and i guess most others have been doing the same thing. it's a tradeoff, like so many others -- except here the websites are making the trade on our behalf without telling us.

what do you think? are you annoyed at not being remembered? should sites tell you how long they plan to remember you? or should i just go on to blathering about other, more important stuff?

Ameriprise -- the trilogy is complete!

as promised, here is the update on the Ameriprise saga:

so the very nice and highly competent customer service person returns my call and we walk through the process of getting accounts set up on their website. i can't log in because i've forgotten my stupid username and password. i'm thinking i should probably just use "stupid" as a username and whatever the numbers are for "stupid" as a password, and then i'd have no trouble remembering them.

anyway, rather than transferring me to some call center in a basement in minneapolis or mumbai, she puts me on hold for a very short interval, and comes back on the line with an IT person who gets the UI/PW situation resolved in the nanosecond it requires to hit a key (which should also be marked "stupid" on her keyboard, so people like me can be more expeditiously handled). then, in a curious display of IT-hijinks, the card account which has been the subject of so much consternation and blogging is all of a sudden resting comfortably on the page, minding its own business, and looking like it's been there all along. i know this isn't the case, and tell them so, and they calmly agree with me even though i can tell by their voices that they think i'm crazy.

i don't care, though, because i am the customer and i have been helped!!! it's silly to think that customer service problems are good for brands, but i will say that sometimes solving a problem gives a brand an added boost it wouldn't have gotten if it had simply performed acceptably well all along. and now, i'm going to tell my 4 followers and anybody else who's seeing this post (given the Ameriprise experience, i now make room for that possibility) about how great Ameriprise is, when i might not have gone out of my way to do that otherwise, because these kinds of great brand UX experiences are, in truth, pretty rare and when people like me find them we tend to talk about them.

i'm sure that Ameriprise, given a normal market, would rather have their clients recommending them for other reasons (e.g., growth, stability, investment performance, etc.) -- and who wouldn't agree that "they made me a ton of money!" sounds a bit more compelling than "they solved my card website problem!" -- but it's a crazy world out there and beggars can't be choosers. small brand victories in the short term can help win the war in the long run.

Ameriprise, thanks for restoring my faith in your brand. we're gonna know each other for a long time.

Brand UX

i had a very interesting conversation today with a very smart guy named dick bondy, a fellow who has probably forgotten more than i'll ever know about brands and marketing. dick is consulting now and is carving out a pretty interesting niche for himself in the area of corporate brand launches.

these events, known in the trade generally as "these @#$%^!& events," due to the fact that nobody really knows what they're supposed to be or how they're supposed to work, and as a result most of us who have done them usually just devise our own programs and hope for the best, or at least, the absence of disaster. ameriprise is an example of a company that did a fabulous job on its launch event, helped by my very good friends at lippincott, when they transitioned from american express to their new moniker.

but in my view, it's not all sweetness and light for the ameriprise brand at the moment. apart from being tarred with the same brush that's blackening the image of all financial services companies, i think they have what i call a brand ux (user experience) problem.

i happen to be an ameriprise customer, having been a client of american express financial services for many years. i've had the same advisor for the last 14 years, and she's fabulous (note, that's not to say i'm doing better in the market than anyone else whose holdings are in the tank). but she is extremely bright, extremely responsive, and i'm quite sure she does a better job at managing my money than i could do on my own.

one of the services she recommended recently was that my husband and i take advantage of the Ameriprise Achiever's Circle credit card, which has no annual fee if you keep a certain level of assets in Ameriprise accounts. i called, spoke to an equally fabulous customer service rep on the phone, and we ordered up the cards. and they came in a lovely little folder with all the features of the card, etc., and at this point i would say my ameriprise user experience was completely intact -- they've suggested to me a brand promise of intelligence, capability and great service, and they had delivered completely on it.

but then... i wanted to set up the card online so i could see transactions, balances, etc., so i went to their website (the intelligent thing, in my view) but couldn't find anyplace where it talked about the card, other than to sell you on signing up for it. so i called the number on the card, and got the web address, http://www.servicemycard.com/, and learned that barclays is the card servicer.

ok, i guess i'm all right with that - strong brands can align with other strong brands and not defeat their value propositions - but it would've been nice if somewhere along the way they'd told me so.

so i begin the laborious process of setting up the card. pick a username. password. photo. phrase. enter your mother's maiden name. the first school you attended (by this time, i'm getting a bit ornery, but dealing with it). now enter your address, telephone, employer, blah blah blah.... and now i'm thinking stuff like "does ameriprise really know what the hell's going on here?" and then finally i get to hit the "go" button and .... it doesn't work.

like an idiot, i try the whole process again (isn't it funny how we've become conditioned to thinking that somehow it's OUR fault and not the website's?). and again, it doesn't work. by this time, i am livid.

i call the number again and tell a not-so-fabulous phone rep the problem. she puts me on hold for an hour -- ok, it was probably 3 minutes but it felt like a hour--and then she says "your financial office has to set it up for you."

me: "financial office? i don't have a financial office. i have an advisor. do you mean my advisor has to set this up?"

her: "your financial office has to set it up for you."

me: "I DON'T HAVE A FINANCIAL OFFICE." (i probably was speaking in all capital letters by this time.)

her: i don't know anything about that. it says here you have to have your financial office set it up for you."

i hung up the phone and chalked it up to material for a good blog post.

this is why brand UX is so, so important. brand is not about a great logo -- it's about a great company, and products, services, and customer interaction that are completely consistent with that greatness. it wouldn't have been so bad, arguably, if i wasn't thrilled with the rest of the ameriprise delivery -- then i would've expected mediocre performance on the credit card thing, and my expectations would have been fulfilled. but they set themselves up to fail on this one, and i can only hope they figure it out soon... before i, and others like me, decide to go elsewhere.