January 2009 - Otis Regrets... or not

Customer Service… do it with a smile, please

A company offered a $10 billing credit over the holidays if I clicked through to their site from a promo email. My statement showed up, no credit, an inquiry to customer service went unanswered, so I contacted PR department and sent them a pdf of the ad along with the email thread. The response:

In response to your inquiry about the $10 off credit, please note that the offer for this credit expired 12/31/08, as indicated in the PDF file sent. However, to reestablish your happiness as a Bill Me Later customer, we have credited your account $10.00. Please be advised that you shall see this change on your next billing statement.

Uhuh. First of all, if she’d checked my file it would be clear that the purchase was made during the eligibility period. Even if not, the customer is always right. To “reestablish my happiness” it would be helpful to eliminate the nyah-nyah.

FSIs (newspaper inserts) and the Super Bowl

Newspaper coupons grasp at 2009 Super Bowl

Three years ago, I did a post on newspaper inserts and the Super Bowl… and how snack manufacturers contort themselves to create a “big game theme” without ever actually mentioning the Big Game, which is a copyrighted product with big licensing fees attached. Looking at this past Sunday’s crop of FSI’s, it’s reassuring to see that nothing has changed. The nation’s economy may have melted down and the web has transformed marketing for most products, but for salty snacks and their teammates it’s still “game on”.

Smirnoff offers us a “smart choice for your super party”. Newman’s Own wants you to “go natural for the big game”. Tums will let us “enjoy the game heartburn free” while Pop-Secret popcorn promises a “home field advantage” and Hersheys wants us to “treat your home team” to a “candy bowl blitz”. Marie’s salad dressings invite you to “tackle the taste” and Dean’s Cool & Creamy exhorts you to “bring the ultimate dip to the ultimate game.” You can also “score one for the home team” with Ling Ling egg rolls, say “it’s good!” [umpire with upstretched hands holding up two hamburgers] for White Castle or enjoy “football food… ready for game time in minutes” from El Monterey Taquitos.

It’s clear that the marketers are doing an end run around the NFL by not mentioning the Super Bowl by name, and that the NFL has dropped the ball by not figuring out a way to bring them into its licensed marketing huddle. But more important, there’s a flagrant violation by most of these marketers because they forget that coming up with a catch-phrase is not the same as selling a product.

And so the winner, in overtime, is an ad from Butterball cold cuts with the theme “One taste brings the party together”. Because after all, the reason these marketers are trying to tie in their products to the Super Bowl is that you’re going to serve them at a party—and here’s one marketer with a generic ad (originally created around the election, maybe?) that says how their product is going to make your event a success. Touchdown!

Heat Pump washer/dryer at CES

When air is compressed it gets hot. When it expands, it cools off. Add some kind of fan to circulate the hot and cold air and you have a heat pump—the technology behind refrigerators, air conditioners, home heating systems for some environments (where there is a considerable difference between the ambient temperature in two different places, e.g. the ground and the air)…. and now, washer/dryers.

Panasonic demonstrated this unit at the 2009 CES. I took a movie of it which is here, on YouTube. (sorry for all the noise… it’s CES!) Unfortunately, there are no plans to import this device to the US because the capacity is too small.

Makin’ bacon at Fancy Food Show

Like CES, the January 2009 Fancy Food Show is down a bit in both attendees and exhibitors. But there’s still room for people like Mr. Bacon here, and his product Bacon Salt which is based on the premise that “everything should taste like bacon”. It’s all vegan and there is a bacon survival kit including bacon chapstick, bacon flavored vegan-aise etc for converted vegetarians who miss the taste of bacon.

Footnote: Fancy Food is where food purveyors, mostly regional distributors or mom-and-pop shops, come to present their offerings to potential retailers or food service clients. There are also a number of international country-sponsored booths though those are really down this year.

AT&T: anti-marketing ninjas at work

So I am finally got my iPhone. Per the earlier post, my web order disappeared into automated customer service limbo yet was impossible to cancel until I called a live sales rep. Meanwhile the price dropped $50 so I place the order again and it goes through with me $50 richer and ATT $50 poorer. And with me, a long time AT&T customer who is now a “new” wireless customer, holding a vastly reduced favorable view of the company. How is this good for the shareholders?

For people who have to call customer service on their lunch hour, stories like this are just more yadda-yadda. But for the marketer came up with the promotion that drew me to AT&T at this particular moment, and is getting reviewed for it possibly with their job on the line, it’s not at all trivial. You did your best work, you got the click, and then the order was deep-sixed by a combination of bad IT architecture and moronic overview by whatever human is supposed to spot-check to ensure all is going well.

I will not bore you with the details of yet another poor customer service experience beyond citing a couple of particularly telling details:

* “Unfortunately, either we have not heard from you in several days, or you have chosen to cancel your order. In either case, this e-mail confirms your order cancellation”. That was in an email I got from AT&T during the first attempt to order. But notice we’re talking about two totally different customer relationship scenarios, and they’ve chosen to respond to both of them in the same email.

Why would this happen? Because some human life form has decided it is “too complicated” to have two different stock emails to respond to two different scenarios that create the same result. The computers don’t care! It is people thinking for the computers that is causing the problem here.

* Now I’ve finally got an order placed, and a confirmation email arrives: “Congratulations! You’re now part of the largest wireless community in America—71 million and growing! You will receive your new wireless phone in a few days.” Well that’s interesting news, since the original order confirmation promised two-day guaranteed delivery! There is also a tracking number in the email but when I click on it, it takes me to AT&T’s home page!

So recognizing it as a UPS number I go to their tracking page and do indeed find the package quickly and discover it actually will be delivered on time in spite of AT&T’s hedging.
Why didn’t they actually confirm that they were delivering on schedule in the confirming email? Why didn’t they reference my specific smart decision to buy an iPhone? You guessed it… they send the same confirming email to EVERYONE, regardless of what offer they responded to.

Just imagine the phone calls to customer service this generates. But there is apparently no consequence and no human cost to AT&T because they have no intention of answering those calls. They’ll be led through a phone tree and ultimately disconnected as I was in my first encounter.

I feel like such a whiner in describing all this but I actually do have a point worth making. In this terrible economy, when every company should be scrambling for every last potential order to keep its bottom line healthy and to keep employees employed, AT&T is running its business like there is money, and orders, to burn.

Much of this definitely goes to the laziness of midlevel IT and customer service folks who are scheming ways to go home on time, not to execute their job which should be to make things easier for the customer. But it also goes back to a hubris that has existed from the tim companies like AT&T established their websites… because face it, the web experience with any phone company is terrible.

What they did: get on the web early, because they’re an Important Company that needs a “web presence”, then cobble on an e-commerce function as an afterthought. Now the tail is wagging the dog because their ecommerce engine doesn’t work and the ridiculous official explanations sound like one of those clone commanders in Star Wars. What they should have done: emulate sites like amazon.com. (or, just emulate amazon.com) which realize that no order can be allowed to get away.

OLPC: when marketing doesn’t work

Give One Get One promotion — Give 1 Get 1 billboard

I find this disturbing: The One Laptop Per Child foundation repeated its “Give One Get One” program from 2007, apparently fixed all the problems from the year before (namely, virtually no promotion other than word of mouth and abysmal fulfillment/customer service)… and saw its sales drop by 93%.

This in spite of a mainstream ad campaign (including outdoor and television) and presumably seamless fulfillment through amazon.com.

The idea of this program is that you purchase two of OLPC’s mini-laptops and one is sent to a kid in a developing country and the other sent to you, allowing you to putz around and explore this approach to improving the world through technology. We did 2 G1G1s last year and it was a worthwhile experience.

But now, explaining the sales implosion, Nicolas Negroponte, the MIT professor who founded OLPC, told the Boston Globe “we’re not the newest game in town… the novelty has worn off.” Really? I would guess that the 2008 campaign reached millions of qualified donors who never even heard of the concept until now.

A better explanation is probably the economy. Most donation-supported organizations are having a tough year, and maybe the people who were most likely to be fascinated enough by the G1G1 concept turned out to be exactly those least able to afford $400 to participate.

But still… a 93% sales fall-off in spite of a marketing campaign that appeared to do everything right. For those of us who live and die by results, that’s a bunch of cold water in the face.

CES 2009: down, but not out

Advance registrations at the Consumer Electronics Show were down 5-7%, but the real question, since most industry folks get in free, was how many would actually show up. Good news. Floor traffic is fine and it’s too packed to move in many places, just like regular years.

Environmentally-sensitive kelp speakers, from Panasonic

Most interesting for me from a marketing perspective were the home monitoring systems, including one from client Schlage locks. Via a low-power wireless mesh network you can lock and unlock your doors, turn lights on and off, and regulate your home entertainment system. With an extra subscription you can log on remotely and see if your kids got home on time (because each family member has their own code to unlock the front door), if you remembered to close the garage door, or preheat the oven. And because every product has to have an environmental angle this year, these systems also have energy components that can dim your lights when you leave the room or turn off the power if you forget.

A few other items of interest:

Finally, a flat screen TV that actually is as thin as a sheet of glass, from LG.
3D televisions, complete with 3D goggles, were everywhere. My favorite was LG again, maybe because they had the best movie playing (a scary Korean animation about a kid, a robot, and a nuclear winter).
Minoru, The world’s first 3D webcam and Sergio iSpin, a sophisticated DJ remix station for your iPod, both not prototypes but selling right now for under $100 on Amazon.
Minoru, the 3d webcam
Beatbot, a puffy robot containing a webcam which can be made to react to stimuli. This is used not for play but as therapy for children; they can interact with the robot directly and make it do things and the webcam can watch what they are doing and track improvements over time.

And this year’s favorite tcotchke: from Cirago, a solar powered LED keychain!