is your brand kicking your customer's seat?

the guy behind me is kicking my seat. not hard enough to make me turn and give him the death-stare (which is most effective on little kids but also works on some adults), but hard enough to be mildly annoying. I’m now having to sit up ramrod-straight, which my mother would have appreciated but which still is a minor inconvenience on this short 40-minute flight.

it makes me wonder if there’s a brand analogy for this – when a company or product inconveniences you enough to be irritated, but not enough to do anything about it (at the moment, at least). is this the insurance company that forces you to endure phone-tree-system hell, the cable company that responds to your reports of intermittent outages but doesn’t ever really fix the problem completely – yeah, that’s you, Time Warner – or even the crazy potato peeler that does a pretty good job until you accidentally shift your grip just an iota and –youch! – where’s that box of Band-Aids?

we know from experience that customers will actually put up with a truckload of crap from poor brands, products, services, and companies because doing anything different is just too hard. in industry parlance, this is called “switching costs” and in my view applies to both the economic and emotional hurdles that one has to vault in order to deal with something new.

switching barriers are thought to be most significant in situations where complex processes are in place – imagine, say, a conveyor line in a manufacturing facility, where replacing something typically has huge time/money implications – but I’d argue that consumers confront them in virtually every situation where satisfaction is lacking.  because at some point, the nature and/or amount of perceived benefit that can be gained from the switch exceeds the pain (both financial and emotional) that has to be endured to receive that benefit.

“perceived” is an important idea here. lots of brands have managed to get companies to switch just based on spin. this has been the case since the beginning of time in the wireless industry, where the level of marketplace churn – people moving between service providers in search of a decent-quality phone, with a simple, affordable plan, and coverage that actually enables you to use them both – is unparalleled.

remember what happened when they introduced number portability? I got in line immediately, if not sooner, to move from my then-current crappy carrier to its competitor, which was also crappy but it was at least a type of crap I hadn’t yet experienced. I then learned that the new crap was in fact worse than the old crap and switched back. Didn’t you?

my point…and I do have one …is that your customers may be closer to making the switch than you’d think. are you doing everything you can to ensure their complete surprise, delight and satisfaction with your company, brand, product, and services? Or are you kicking their seat just a little bit because it’s easier than figuring out how not to kick it and you’re pretty sure they’re ok with your crap and wouldn’t be motivated to check out somebody else’s?

and now, please excuse me while I move across the aisle -- where the seat behind me is unoccupied.

photo credit: the quickten.com

these pants are made for standing

These boots are made for walking
and that's just what they'll do
one of these days these boots
are gonna walk all over you.
- Nancy Sinatra

i have not been able to get that stupid song out of my head for the last couple of days. here's why.

it all started when i purchased a pair of Issey Miyake pleated pants. i was planning a trip that involved a 3-hour plane ride from austin to new jersey, and the pants (if not the wearer) had to look good at the end of the ride. i figured they'd be comfortable, too.

now, i didn't know that issey miyake was into apparel. call me fashion-backward ... i guess somehow i'd missed that issue of instyle. but i've worn the cologne for years and love it, so i was willing to give the guy some brand largesse in an adjacent category. plus, they were on sale, which was good 'coz they're typically not ... shall we say... value-priced.

the pants are pleated in hundreds (i'm guessing) of tiny, 1/16" pleats, which is what gives them their unique look. pleats reportedly have been with us since the time of the egyptians, who apparently had enough free time on their hands to do this sort of thing when they weren't trying to get the philistines to look the other way. but i wasn't really thinking about this when i bought them. i needed a good-looking, good quality, comfortable, well-wearing pair of pants, and that's what i thought i was getting.

so i wore them on the trip, and it was all good. the pants held up fabulously well, even when my return flight was cancelled and forced me to go through cleveland to get to milwaukee. i have nothing in particular against cleveland, but suffice it to say that 5pm on a day that started at 4am, i was more interested in my pants coming off and being replaced by pajamas as quickly as possible.

it was only later, when i was assembling clothing for a trip to the dry cleaner, that i actually got a look at the pants' labels. ordinarily, i check the care instructions when i buy a garment, just to see whether or not i'll be putting my dry cleaners' kids through post-doc studies (their undergraduate work has already been well covered). but i was in a hurry at purchase time and didn't see this -- because i guarantee you, if i had, the pants would still be on a hanger in the store and i would be in the hospital recovering from whatever injury you get when you can't stop laughing hysterically.

here is what the tag says (and i could not make this up if i tried):

minimum machine wash
do not bleach
do not iron
do not dry clean
do not tumble dry

so i'm thinking ... well, ok, i have some hand-washing ahead of me. not the worst thing in the world. but wait, there's more!

in order to preserve the shape, please observe the following. pleats are easily marred by heat and pressure. avoid sitting and applying other types of pressure for long periods of time.

avoid sitting? they're pants! i can't tell you how much my sensibilities as a marketer are offended by this type of total disregard for product-in-use. it reminds me of when motorola in its early days made a cell phone where you had to press the "on" button to turn the phone off, or the kind of phone voicemail systems that are supposed to get you to a relevant contact more easily but have exactly the opposite effect. it's just plain silly... and annoying.

good product design, in my view, starts with ethnographic research so you can actually understand in a very specific way how your customer behaves and how the product is, or is not, likely to meet his/her needs and expectations. in an ideal world, you uncover some bit of something that enables you to create a product that offers surprise and delight, or at least one that doesn't work to offend your target.

i still can't get the tune out of my head, except now it goes:

These pants are made for standing
and that's just what they'll do
one of these days these pants
are gonna go to Goodwill, too.

susan boyle and kaytee suet

unless you've been hiding under a giant rock for the last several days, you know about susan boyle and the close to 50 million downloads of the youtube video showcasing her performance on "Britain's Got Talent." she's been on larry king, she's been the subject of articles in the world's major newspapers, and certainly gotten her 15 minutes and more in the blogosphere, with more than 2700 posts a day last week.

most of the coverage that attempts to explain why the world is so taken with susan, i think, misses the mark. many of these stories flail into armchair psychoanalysis, such as peter bregman's: "Who among us does not move through life with the hidden sense, maybe even quiet desperation, that we are destined for more? That underneath our ordinary exterior lies an extraordinary soul? That given the right opportunity, the right stage, the right audience, we would shine as the stars we truly are?" or even the more straight-up commentaries about how an angelic voice emanating from a sort of frumpy exterior has unexpectedly provoked a debate about prejudice against the not so young and not so beautiful.

but i think the reason that we're captivated is much simpler, and it's actually the same reason that i am at this moment, in an equally odd turn of events, thrilled with Kaytee suet.



those of you who try to attract wild birds to your feeders know what i'm talking about. birds are notoriously fickle. you can put food out in the middle of winter when there's nothing else to eat, and if they don't like it, they won't eat it. (this concept is totally lost, by the way, on willy & hoover, who never met a foodstuff -- or even non-footstuffs -- they didn't like). anyway, we'd tried the gamut of designer-brand suets, some with cherries, or orange pieces, or nuts, or i don't know what else. they might as well have been laced with gold, and we'd sometimes spend upward of $6 or $8 on the stuff, only to have to dig it out of the stupid little box to try something else. so one day, out of spite, almost, we bought the kaytee product, which was about $1-something and -- thinking about susan here -- didn't really look the part, if you know what i mean.

but remarkably, the kaytee worked! along came the cardinals, bluejays, finches and the little blue buntings in droves, and they couldn't get enough of the stuff. i could not have been more ... and here's the point of this post ... more surprised and delighted. if you watch the entire clip of susan's performance, somewhere in the first minute or so, they cut to backstage where the field producers are, and one of them says to the camera, "you weren't expecting that, were you... no!," which is i think really what's driving the emotion around this.

the surprise comes from, i suppose, what some people see as the incongruity between her visage and her voice. i got over this a long time ago, however, when i first got a look at the album covers for rush, steely dan and some other incredible musicians who were not similarly gifted in looks. but then again, isn't this why even the cheapest concert tickets sometimes sell out? presumably, some people are there for the music, as well as (or even maybe for more than) the spectacle.

anyway, surprise and delight are absolutely key to customer engagement, retention and advocacy. good advertising and pr may get a horse to your bucket, but it won't keep him drinking, much less telling other horses about it. when we run into surprise and delight, 2 things happen: 1) we build an automatic positive relationship with the product/brand at that moment (not to say it can't be undone later, but that's for a different post); and 2) we are generally motivated to tell others about it, often in a highly proactive way. whether you're talking about susan or suet, the results are the same ... we need more of it, and quickly!