Tag Archive for guerrilla customer service

The Clean and Green Club, November 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2021

Guerrilla Customer Service as Marketing

I listened to a webinar by John Livesay, who brands himself as “the pitch whisperer.” And I found it interesting that a lot of his pitch secrets had to do with extreme customer service, something I’ve been a fan of for years.John led off by describing Banana Republic’s free secure/guarded phone charging while shopping. Sales went up 15 percent, because people hung out until their phones were charged!

It reminded me of listening to the amazing Jack Mitchell, author of one of my favorite books on extreme service, Hug Your Customers. He describes having a staffer get on a transatlantic plane to deliver a suit the customer needed at an overseas conference. His whole book is full of great examples. It was one of the first books I reviewed in this newsletter, way back in November, 2003.

Brands at the top end, from Ritz-Carlton to Mercedes to Neiman Marcus, have offered legendary customer service for years, and are very aware that their efforts there are part of their overall marketing. But unlike many of companies famous for outrageously customer-centric service, Banana Republic is not a high-end luxury brand. It’s not the bottom end, but the typical middle-class person would be comfortable shopping there.

Another non-luxury brand that offers above-industry-standard is Southwest Airlines—which, interestingly enough, began as a price-leader but built amazing service in from the get-go. It’s not just the only US airline I’m aware of that doesn’t charge for a stowed bag or a ticket-change, and possibly the only one whose flight attendants are encouraged to have a sense of humor. The company also empowers its gate and phone/online agents to make the customer happy. They earned MY loyalty when the one-day closure of my local airport for a snowstorm, somewhere around 2009, meant we would not be able to get on a cruise ship in Tampa. Southwest allowed us to reroute and fly one day later to Fort Lauderdale, the ship’s first stop—so we were able to salvage the cruise. So even though it’s often no longer the price leader, if we can get close to the price and convenience of a different itinerary via Southwest, that’s how we usually fly.

In my one-person service business, I often look for opportunities to help. Sometimes that means sending a media lead to the perfect source—whether or not that person is a client (and I don’t charge for that). Sometimes, it’s looking around a client’s website and making notes on what I could improve (and while I don’t charge for taking those notes if the client hasn’t requested it, I do charge for making the improvements). And sometimes it’s a quick call to answer a client’s or prospect’s question, just as a favor. And I believe this is one reason why I have some clients for years at a time.

How can you up the level of service in your business—and harness the marketing power of the positive impression you make?

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

My interview, How to Write a Book for Social Change, is live on Dan Janal’s Write Your Book in a Flash podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPUoVPp2yP4 . I had a short-term physical issue that day, which explains some of the weird pauses—but the information is really good, and because it’s focused on authors building movements, it’s significantly different material from many of my other interviews.

  • How books have ALREADY changed the world (with examples)

  • How to research to support the point of view you want people to adopt

  • How to leverage your book to widen the audience for your point of view

  • How self-publishing can give you leverage to get a traditional publisher

  • How to use YOUR book to create a movement

It’s worth noting that a lot of my social change consulting practice is book shepherding and book marketing for authors with socially conscious books. In other words, if you’re looking to get a change-the-world book done, published, and/or marketed, please get in touch: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/

Profiled in this article about (of all things) how I as a rural business owner and activist use broadband. https://www.explorebeyond.org/stories/broadband-powers-entrepreneurship-in-rural-new-england/

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Seducing Strangers

Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You’re Selling, by Josh Weltman

Real-life ad man Weltman was a co-producer of the Mad Men TV show for several years. And this book has a lot of good advice for marketers, especially those whose strategies rely heavily on advertising. More importantly, Weltman leads off with excellent lessons in consumer psychology—and to me, those are some of the best insights in the book. A few examples:

  • Happiness is not about what you have, but what you EXPECT to have—and how closely that matches reality (p. 10)
  • Forget “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” The reality is that once you build that mousetrap—and whether it’s better is subjective—you have to TELL the world (p. 11). For every example like Google, where the world actually did beat a path to its virtual door, thousands of businesses foundered with excellent products strangled by poor marketing.
  • Never do a good promotion for a bad product; it will kill your business (p. 12)
  • Solving customer problems is more about DISCOVERY than invention; we’re more curious than creative (p. 13)
  • (My favorite) Advertising (which I would broaden to include marketing generally) is about CONFIRMING, not changing, prospects’ minds (pp. 14-16)
  • Engage both adrenaline (emotional response) and dopamine (explanation); if the main headline confuses, the subhead must explain—or vice-versa (pp 25-28). Emotion cements the brand, while facts cement the sale (pp. 38-40).

Weltman also provides the recipe for a successful advertising developer: keen observer; good listener; endlessly curious; and, interestingly, “pathological inability to lie” in their ads (pp. 15-16, emphasis added). He noted that even Mad Men’s Draper wrote truthful ads, even though truth in other aspects of his life was often lacking.

Advertising [or marketing] is a strange business because different companies (or parts of a company) are responsible for making the brand promise (the agency or marketing department) and for keeping or exceeding that promise (design, manufacturing, distribution, etc.). Both are required to build a brand (p. 33).

For Weltman, successful marketing answers one of four questions, each used at a different stage in the customer lifecycle—and each requiring different ads (or other marketing messages):

  1. What is it? (aimed at prospects who don’t know the product or company)
  2. Why do I need it now? (creating scarcity or urgency or bargain-frenzy among those who are wavering or not yet committed—with these, be careful not to cannibalize the 20 percent who would buy anyway without a discount or other incentive)
  3. What makes it different? (why they should choose you over a competitor)
  4. Who else thinks it’s good? (social proof and community building—these ads are aimed at your existing customers, to turn them into raving fans)

By far the biggest portion of the book explores these four types, the situations to use them in, and what you can expect to happen. The important thing is that each marketing piece should only address one of the four, because the different messages aim at different market segments with very different needs.

I’m a long-time believer in segmenting the market; if you’ve heard me speak, you’ve probably heard me discuss marketing differently to Deep Greens, Lazy Greens, Non-Greens, and Green-Hostiles. But for me, the big insight of this book is to also segment by stage in the buying process and the lifetime customer cycle. And I like the idea of using tag lines that unify these different stages (p. 61).

The market also shifts by demographics and psychographics, of course. In one of many case studies, Weltman goes through the process of advertising an SUV specifically to communitarian Generation Y, with a brilliant spot where sequential users do something cool with the car, then toss the keys to the next user (pp. 75-77). That’s useless to individualistic, antiauthoritarian GenXers but sings to digital natives Millennials who create their own participatory Internet daily (pp. 147-148).

Another counter-intuitive case study involves setting expectations low enough that a shaky brand can keep its promise (pp. 91-93)—an advertising heresy! And a refreshing admission that not all marketers believe in the products they’re hired to pitch. (Personally, I turn down assignments that go against my values or my quality standards.)

And I love his focus on the power of the right words, noting again that persuasion requires both fact and emotion. That means ruthlessly going over copy drafts to change weak words like “hungry” into powerful ones like “voracious” (p. 120). And remembering that once your prospect agrees to your key principle, persuasion is happening.

Unlike most marketing authors I’ve read, Weltman sees online as fundamentally different than offline marketing. The final nine chapters focus on online: how to demonstrate values and vision through empathy, what stories to tell to whom (pp. 161-162), four key strategic questions (p. 165), and why to change people’s sense of what’s possible (167-168).

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.

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