Customer Service Isn't New.

Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Hsieh have picked up a lots of plaudits for focussing their Le Web talks on customer service. Deservedly so. But this is nothing new. That they seem so insightful to many people is simply an indictment of the levels to which things have been allowed to fall.

Customer service has always been there. It's encapsulated in the P of product. If you think that your product is simply that which your customer buys from you, you're deluding yourself. They're buying the product/service plus everything that you provide to make the consumption of that product an enjoyable and fulfilling experience that makes them better at doing something.

I once heard a marketing professor postulate a 5th marketing P (for Phacilitating Services) to emphasise just that fact. He was right because his base example of this was IBM's reputation for post-sales service and support in the 60s, but he was also wrong. Wrong because separating it from the product suggests that it's a marketing option you can choose to prioritise or not.

Customer service shouldn't be the centralised, prescriptive provision that all too easily conjures up images of mission statments, faux sincerity and ranks of low-paid transient phone-jockeys. It should be a distributed, pervasive culture in which everybody can fearlessly act on their own initiative to right a wrong or create a memorable interaction. Customer sevice is not an add-on, it's a necessity.

You Heard It Here First.

The Nokia store that I criticised on this blog back in April and August of 2008 is to close.

In this report, it is claimed that the failure of the £4 million investment was because "the store may have proved a little “extravagant” in terms of cost". No, it was because you couldn't use the phones. And worse than that, it was just a store.

Addendum: The Apple store across the street continues to flourish, but I notice that the staff are getting a little more officious. I recently witnessed people being dissuaded from using computers to check their email because this is an "iphone activation area". Are they in danger of becoming just a store? Not yet.

Behavioural Marketing.

Iain really liked this campaign and bracketed it with Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice. While I like it, it's not much more than a digital version of the traditional promotional competition. The key for me is that it's utilising technology rather than the behaviours related to that technology. It works but it's not new.

Social media and digital aren't inherently new behaviours, they're new technologies/ecosystems that facilitate existing behaviours. But where Burger King was really smart was in placing a new version of that behaviour - Facebook friending - at the centre of its interaction. A behaviour that hadn't existed without the technology.

Marketing is all about behaviour, but changing behaviour is really difficult to do. It's much smarter to adapt your marketing to existing behaviours in a way that gets the user to think about your product/service and perhaps become inclined to change another behaviour.

Don't Just Focus On The Big Idea?

Last week, Faris (a big thinker) asked me "What's the Big idea?" We were in a pub - where such questions often get asked - and it was the day of the UK ad industry's Battle of Big Thinking where a number of mutual friends (including Amelia and Katy) had, no doubt, spoken eloquently and brilliantly about a variety of ideas.

But were they big ideas? Is social media a big idea? Is branding? Faris and I agreed that fire and alcohol might both be classified as big ideas, but we weren't sure about the rest.

Big idea are big because they are so rare and yet businesses are obsessed with having them, be that in their product range or their marketing. That seems like a futile effort to me. The only important big idea for business is their underlying strategy which should underpin everything they do - though, of course, the search for the big idea often causes them to ignore that fact.

That aside, it's much better to focus on having a lot of arguably smaller ideas: small ideas that can have immediate impact, small ideas that can generate further small ideas and small ideas that might just turn out to be slightly bigger than you first thought.

The Medium Is the Message.

Last week, I attended an unusual evening built around neuroscientist David Eagleman's book of short stories about what happens when you die.

As well as the engaging conversation of Phillip Pullman, there were a series of live and recorded readings by luminaries such as Jarvis Cocker, Stephen Fry and Miranda Richardson. And it was this that fascinated me - some of us preferred the live performances, others found ourselves more engaged in the disembodied voice of the recorded readings.

In an attention economy, it is crucial to remember that distraction takes many different forms.

Thank You Notes.

It was interesting to hear a group of newspaper letter-editors reporting an increase in one type of letter. The type where readers make public their appreciation of customer service that they have recently received.

Therein lies the seeds of an economic direct-mail campaign focussed on every local newspaper in your markets, but I'd say it was safer and smarter to focus on your customer service quality and let your customers do the direct-mail part for you.

The (Same Old) 4Ps Of Marketing 2.0.

When the new "paradigm" comes along, people often describe it in ways that differentiate it totally from what came before. Often to enhance their guru status. That's a mistake. Revolution is rare - evolution far less so. Relating the new to the old can be much more insightful and is also more welcomed by the unconverted.

In that vein, I prefer to look at marketing 2.0 in terms of existing frameworks rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the two ends of the transfer are still essentially the same - there is stuff and there are customers. They may be changed people and it often is new stuff, but the real changes lie in the interaction between the two. The traditional 4Ps still apply, but they present new problems.


Price

Economic theory dictates that equilibrium prices equal marginal cost. In the digital world of cost-less replication, that price is increasingly tending towards zero.

While that may not make obvious business sense to producers, there is all too often someone who will think they can do this profitably via aggregation or just delusion and there is increasingly an audience who expect it to be so. Thus, even if you are not valuing your worth at zero, they are.

Solution – sell something with a marginal cost greater than zero.


Place

This used to mean distribution and it used to be on the high street. Now its more likely to mean visibility and is increasingly found online – not necessarily for the final purchase, but certainly for the discovery

It’s not so much about identifying the best places to capture physical footfall. It’s about being wherever the digital footfall is. Fish where the fish are – don’t expect them to come to you anymore. Just as "now is preferable to free", so too is proximity.

Solution – be searchable, findable and spreadable.


Promotion

Promotion has all too often been confused for the totality of marketing. Moreover, it's arguably been shown to be less effective than previously believed. Vested interests resist but we have to think more closely and seriously about what we mean by promotion (not just advertising) and what the role of marketing/promotion is.

As connectivity gets greater, promotion gets smaller – that doesn't mean restricted, just more personal. Don’t dictate what users do with your offering, just give them space to use it and reason to proselytise it.


Solution - fan club not fanfare.


Product

Product is still the most important element of the marketing mix. It's just clearer that this is the case, that bad products are more easily uncovered/spoken about and that the definition of product must be expanded to include customer service and usability.

Your product/service has, of course, to be unique and remarkable. But what has changed is the "always in beta" philosophy of "fail quickly, fail cheaply". You don't dictate what the product is, you make a suggestion and adapt it in response to your users' wishes.

Solution - have a point of view, not a point of functional differentiation.


Bottom line - you can create all the additional Ps you like. Yes, we need to consider participation, permission and proximity. Just don't tell me that's new or that the old disciplines no longer apply. It isn't and they do.