Tag: social media

Openly ask

FabrizioLeave a comment

Do you ever bother to openly ask?

A team member, what they would like to work on.

A customer, how they will be using your product.

A user, what topic would they be happy receiving content about.

Your partner, how would they feel if something would happen.

Your boss, what’s keeping them up at night.

Most of our businesses and lives are based on assumptions. Sometimes we hide them under the labels “experience” and “data”, and yet assumptions they are and they will be.

Should we instead bother and ask the question?

A whole lot more

FabrizioLeave a comment

I can find all the praises for your product or service easily.

I can talk to one of your reps in minutes.

If I prefer so, your chatbot will guide me to the content most relevant to my situation.

I can painlessly answer a survey to help you improve your website, and with one single click give you consent to using (and share) information about my interests.

Your marketing will seek me out to offer more, for free, as long as I stay engaged.

That rep is still trying to schedule a follow-up call to offer a discount if I sign now.

And then, once I am finally your customer, if I need some information, I have to dig them out of an overly complicated help center page, or pray for a telephone number to appear below one of the folds of your website and wait in queue.

And if I decide that, for any reason, I do not need your service anymore, you frustrate the hell out of me with rules, counteroffers, bundles, and eventually a cold goodbye.

There’s no balance in the way companies allocate budget throughout the customer journey. Or perhaps it’s just they think the journey ends when the customer has paid.

There’s a whole lot more to it.

Interests

Fabrizio1 Comment

No company intentionally goes against its interests, the so called shareholders value.

Some companies, though, pursue shareholders value in the long term. And not surprisingly, by doing so, they also manage to more positively contribute to the communities they operate in.

Other companies, instead, pursue shareholders value in the short term. And when doing that, it’s very challenging to also juggle the interests of people that happen to live where the company carries out its business.

A good example of the first type of company is Mars. In 2009, 2013, and 2016, Mars has interpreted a raising trend and has shrinked the size of their snacks, so that they could be consumed while still meeting general guidelines for the assumption of sugars. They have also doubled down on the effort by challenging some high level partnerships and campaigning to reduce weekly consumption of their products.

A good example of the second type of company is Facebook. Despite having been asked to take action for the negative effects on communities all over the world – from threatening western democracies to being a platform used for inciting genocide, from the horrific impact on mental health to the malicious inflation of ads metrics to fulfill their own agenda -, management sticks to their guns and refuses to translate a part of their financial success into effective measures to counter these (and other) problems.

A company is never expected to be a charity, and there are negative side effects to most products or services we are happy to live with. Yet the way business is done draws a clear line between the two types. As you build and grow (or help building and growing) your organisation, you should think about on what side you want it to be.

Counterintuitive

Fabrizio1 Comment

We won’t open an e-mail we have not asked for.

We avoid banners on websites as if they were bearing plague.

Whenever possible, we avoid giving permission to be tracked for commercial and retargeting purposes.

We are fed up with listicles and click baits.

We are very sceptical of sources we are not familiar with.

We do not answer cold calls, and when we do we shut the conversation off as soon as possible.

We get mad when an ad appears for a product we have only visited the information page once. Three months ago.

We would never buy from a place that treat us badly, disrespectfully and dishonestly.

We could spend half of our very precious day to engage in an angry conversation with a customer support rep that cannot tell us why we are not getting what we have paid for.

And yet, as marketers we often assume others will be happy when exposed to all of that.

Why?

Do, measure and adjust

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are many different ways to address any case. Unfortunately, you probably have resources (attention, money, energy, motivation) to try one or two of them at the same time.

The point is then to avoid lengthy discussions about which way is the better (not to mention pointless scenario-building that change the rules of the case), and put some effort instead in identifying what successfully addressing the case looks like.

And then just do, measure and adjust.