Charlie Moger's ADmissions | Strategic marketing and advertising advice

Be reliable
Do what you say as you say every time

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It seems a little thing on the surface. After ringing up your purchase at My Fit Foods, the person behind the counter carries your purchase to the door, many times even to the car. It’s surprising because it’s a level of service you don’t expect. That’s customer delight.

In this age of self-serve everything, encountering service once taken for granted is delightful. What’s equally remarkable is the consistency of this customer experience at every My Fit Foods location I’ve visited. “It’s something we’re known for,” says Store Manager Jason Smith.

Advertising brings in prospects. Service creates customers. Customer delight builds loyalty. Does your team reliably delight customers? That’s why reliability is one The Ten BE’s of Better Branding.

Never argue with a drunk

People will teach you a lot, if you let them. One such life lesson, dealing with difficult people, came my way 35 years ago in that building behind me; our family restaurant at the time, Grandma’s Kitchen in Whitefield, New Hampshire. It’s a lesson worth sharing because advertising will bring the occasional knucklehead through your door too.

First, let’s wind the clock back to the bicentennial year of 1976. I was 17. Had a car. Had money. Had time. Had some sketchy ideas too. Get the picture? Mom did too. That’s why she decided to “hire” me. Instead of summer fun with friends, I worked at Grandma’s. Overnights: 11pm-to-7am. Six nights a week. All. Summer. Long.

Good things seldom start after midnight

Most nights were deadly quiet—until 2:30 a.m. That’s when the bars closed. Headlights flooded the parking lot. Customers poured in, filling the room with 90 minutes of bedlam: Partially, fully, and excessively lit party people all wanted food and fun on the way home. Food they found on the menu. Fun they found in messing with me.

Years later, I still apply the lessons learned in those many nocturnal skirmishes. Chief among them: never argue with a drunk.

Okay, drunk isn’t a nice word. But, how else do you describe rude, abusive people trying taking advantage of you while irrationally believing they should get away with it? I’m sticking with drunk. It works better in mixed company other equally appropriate words.

Five ways to deal with a drunk

I’m betting you deal with the occasional drunk, too. We all do. Whenever I encounter one, though, my Grandma Kitchen experience sure comes in handy.

1. Don’t take it personally
People are who they are. It’s not because of you
2. Don’t bother reasoning
Rationality in the absence reason is rhetorical quicksand
3. Focus on the outcome
Don’t get sucked into the moment; stay on course
4. Make them the winner
Put what they want on the other side of what you need
5. Remember why you’re there
Rude dollars deposit in the bank just like polite ones

Returning to the scene

This summer my kids and I went on a thousand-mile New England road trip that took us past Grandma’s Kitchen. Even though Mom sold it long ago and moved west, I still had to take my kids in for dinner. While it’s changed a great deal, it’s still the same to me. It’s where I learned how to deal with a drunk and still get my job done. Thanks, Mom.

Be Unpredictable
Customers love delightful surprises

Giving away Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album for 99-cents was a generous offer by Amazon. Daring carries risks. In this case it generated bad customer experiences when extreme demand crashed Amazon’s servers. What no one could have predicted was what happened next.

After scaling up their server capability, Amazon repeated the offer two days later. Bad feelings were washed away by their making it right. The offer was incredibly generous: the do-over cost Amazon an estimated $3 million dollars. Because it was so unpredictable, the entire episode generated many more times that in publicity.

What else would you expect from a double-dip of the Ten Be’s of Better Branding?

Swinging for the bigs on Cape Cod

An excerpt from my family travel journal. Cape Cod was one of the stops on our thousand-mile New England road trip. Summer league baseball won’t seem relevant to your marketing and advertising, unless you look deeper.

Every summer, the best college players from across the country come by invitation to play in the Cape Cod Baseball League. I have been reading about the league since a Marc Setty at James Hardie turned me onto the book, The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream.

After returning from an afternoon of vacation beach time on the cape, I settled in to watch The Red Sox hammering the Astros back back home in Houston’s Minute Maid Park. Ironic, eh? But, the clap of a bat and sound of applause outside my window lured me onto the porch. The glow of outfield lights above the treetops behind our hotel confirmed my suspicion: it had to be a Cape Cod League game.

It was an out-of-body thing: On went my Tevas. Grab the camera. Scamper across the parking lot. Follow the sound and lights. Emerging through a row of Field of Dreams hedges I found the Hyannis Harbor Hawks in the top of the 8th inning against the Wareham Gatemen. The 9-5 score told me the game was pretty much in the bag for Hyannis. The play-by-play announcer, pictured here doing the Internet broadcast, pretty much confirmed that. But, in baseball, as in life, it’s not over till it’s over. So, I stayed for the remaining inning-and-a-half.

The men pictured here are watching closer than most. They’re professional scouts looking for talent. Chances are some of the players they’re watching will next play in major league baseball.

These are the stakes for the talented young men chosen to spend a summer playing baseball on fields like the one behind our Cape Cod hotel. It’s also proof of what can happen for all of us when we squeeze the trigger and ride the bullet. When in doubt, play ball!

Be Specific
Define expectations clearly

Clearly, this guy doesn’t get it. This pile-up of products is a classic. Trying to be all things to all people makes you nothing to anyone. I learned as a teenage disc jockey a lesson about choosing which records to play that applies equally to business:

You’re defined as much by what you don’t do as you are by what you choose to do. Kitchens and baths? Sure. Kitchens and baths and floors? Okay. Kitchens and baths and floors and garage doors? Heh?

This also steps on the toe of Be #1: Be real, know who you are—and who you aren’t. I’ll bet if you called this guy, he’d do roof repair too. I’m sure he’s not plugged into the Ten BE’s of Better Branding.

Can it just work for you too?

Apple doesn’t build computers, mp3 players, or even phones. They provide something more meaningful: human connections. Instead of merely selling a device, Steve Jobs and company connects us to what we care about: music, people, memories. How they do is easy to see, if you know where to look.

In his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address, Jobs gave up the magic on a single slide. It wasn’t quoted in any news story or blog I could find. Yet, it succinctly conveys both what Apple does and how you can drive focused excellence in your company.

Hidden in plain view

After parading their latest innovations past the convention of software developers, Jobs summed up what makes Apple Apple. Echoing three words on the slide displayed two-stories high behind him, he said “It just works.” Well, duh.

Amazing things are often hidden in plain view. In this case, “It just works,” is more than a catch phrase or summation of the presentation. It’s a filter for screening out what might not fit the brand. It’s a lens that focuses innovation. It’s a measuring stick. It’s Apple’s North Star.

It works even when it doesn’t

The elegance of this simple phrase is how it both defines what Apple stands for and what they stand against. When MobileMe, a collection of online tools, crashed and burned on launch, Jobs threw himself on the sword. He admitted it didn’t measure up to Apple’s standards—without elaborating on them specifically. Now you know: Mobile me didn’t “just work.”

AppleTV didn’t just work either. Only after Apple replaced the original hard-drive version with a hockey-puck-sized device that streams instead of stores tv shows and movies did AppleTV meet their standard. The original was clunky and hard to use. The new one plugs in and, of course, just works. It works so well, cable operators may be seeing a threat in AppleTV.

What works for you?

Technically-oriented people (aka geeks) may prefer devices with steep learning curves. Cleaving onto cantankerous operating systems, they look down their noses at Apple’s ease of use. No worries. There’s a market for devices that don’t just work, too. As they say, that’s why there are both blue cars and red cars.

Apple’s lineup is sheathed in so much cool, it’s easy to overlook their underlying philosophy. Three simple words shape everything they do: it just works. What simple words shape what you do?

Strategic marketing and advertising advice

Be reliable
Do what you say as you say every time