Month: October 2016

Choice Hotels loses a customer

It was Parents Weekend in Amherst, MA where our son is going to school. We were late in finding a hotel and did not realize when we reserved for that the Quality Inn in Chicopee was over 30 minutes away on a dark, winding,  back road. We arrived intact and politely told the desk clerk that we’d be checking out in the morning. He told us no, we’d reserved for two nights and we would be charged for two nights. And that’s how Choice Hotels loses a customer.

En route to Amherst the next morning, after paying for 2 nights but staying 1, I spent time on the phone with Choice customer service. They told me they this was an extremely unusual policy but because I had agreed to it–by initialing that document they give you when you arrive at 11 pm–the hotel was standing its ground. Meanwhile, my wife found a totally pleasant accommodation at Holiday Inn Express in Hadley, 2 miles from the campus.

The Chicopee Quality Inn was a little shabby, but not outright dangerous. The Holiday Inn Express was a definite step up and well worth paying $100 more. I have an upcoming business trip and have already joined the Holiday Inn loyalty program and identified their location near my client and will likely stay there. And will stay there again and again on future trips.

Now here’s the takeaway. I’ve probably stayed at Choice properties 50 times, usually for multiple nights, because they’re near a business meeting and I don’t care to pay for frills. They’re a franchise operation: independent owners who are members of a group. And this one particularly avaricious owner in Chicopee, MA has likely brought an end to my long association with the Choice brand.

This is how you lose a customer: not the only way, but certainly a very effective way. Let individual franchisees push customers away, since most folks won’t realize they are dealing with a jerk whose actions don’t extend across the company. Thus one bad apple spoils the entire brand. If you are interested in driving your business into the ground, I highly recommend this model.

If you care to short Choice hotels, their ticker is CHH. They’re currently rated 6.2  (a little above average) by Starmine but I predict that number is going down.

Attend a “Creative Town Hall Meeting” in Monday afternoon Ignition Session on October 17

Are you coming to the DMA’s annual conference in Los Angeles next week? Then make plans to attend my Ignition session, “The Devil in the Details,” at 4 pm on Monday the 17th. It promises to be a repeat of a highly successful and well-attended session last year in which creatives shared their pet peeves and inspiration–a town hall meeting for copywriters, art directors and those who work with them.

The DMA took a big risk last year in doing something that’s a no no in direct response: changing your control without testing it. The 3 day conference was compressed to 2 days, and content below the keynote level was reclassified as Insight, Inspiration, Ideation and Ignition depending on the format and content. Ignition is supposed to be audience-led. A moderator facilitates, but the folks in the audience actively participate and lead the conversation. Did it work? Yes. The conference was well-attended and the sessions for the most part got positive reviews, so we’re moving forward with the same thing.

As for my session, I was asked to take over for my pal Carol Worthington Levy and Herschell Gordon Lewis, who for several years had presented a session featuring examples of good and bad creative execution, often hilarious. (Herschell passed away last month after a very full life at the age of 87. He was a major inspiration to me.) To accommodate the new format, I showed a few slides and then asked the audience to pile on with their own experiences, eg what’s the worst project you’ve ever worked on, the worst client etc and what can we learn from it.

It was a huge hit. The room was packed and creatives and account managers loved the opportunity to air their gripes about crazy clients, up-tight legal departments and the “suits”. Now that we’re back with a better idea of how the Ignition format works, I’ll be ready with some examples to prime the pump and then step back and watch the fireworks happen. (Not to mix a metaphor or anything.)

Here are a few topics as a starter list:

  • Those darn kids… why won’t millennials buy my product?
  • Can brands get away with talking like teenagers in social media?
  • My best idea was killed by the ____ [client, suits, legal department etc]
  • My biggest flop and what I learned from it.
  • Can you be funny and still sell stuff?

And there’s more! If you have topics you’d like to add, email me and we’ll get them into the list.  See you on Monday, October 17 at 4 pm!

Should you care about email marketing?

Somehow email marketing has become the red headed stepchild of promotion channels. It’s not as pervasive as Facebook, immediate as Twitter or insidious as native advertising. And it’s all too easy to take email for granted and put it on autopilot with a management tool like Eloqua or Pardot. So email gets short shrift in planning meetings and the email marketing manager is often someone who’s expected to handle production rather than make a creative and strategic impact. Am I right?

But email marketing is also the face of your company to people on your email list as well as email inquirers. And if you don’t pay attention to the channel you risk looking like you are clueless or don’t care. I’ve recently moved, which has caused a number of new interactions. Here’s an email from Thermador customer service when I asked about a part for my 25-year old range:

Good Afternoon Mr. Maxwell,

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. We here at Thermador are always more than happy to assist you with your appliance inquiries and we appreciate you allowing us to do so.

Please accept our sincere apology for the delayed response as we are currently experiencing a high volume of email correspondence.

In regards to your inquiry, unfortunately there aren’t any parts available for your unit…

See what I mean? Here’s a potential new customer reaching out to you… sell me an upgraded product! And, while you’re at it, engage with me instead of saying you’ve been too busy to answer my query.

Here’s another. The USPS partners with a company called My Move which makes a number of offers during the process of changing your address. There’s an interstitial page with check boxes for retailers you want offers from, and after you leave there is a second page with more offers. I get it, the second page is for marketers who didn’t pay enough to be on the first page, but there are some really good offers here. $50 off $500 at Amazon! 10% off my next Home Depot purchase! I want this stuff.

But when I try to submit the page, it doesn’t work. I just get the spinning ball in my browser (Safari for Mac… I suspect a compatibility issue). I find a support link for My Move and I write to them and describe the above problem in detail and ask how I can get these offers since the submit button didn’t work. The response:

Hi,

MY MOVE sends your information to the advertisers you selected during your transaction. Fulfillment of specific offers is done by those advertisers and can take anywhere from 48 hours to several weeks depending on the content. For example, a catalog you selected may not arrive for a few weeks, but a coupon that is emailed may arrive in just 2 days. If you need a more specific time frame please contact the advertiser directly. Good luck with your move, and I hope this has helped.

See what I mean? No, it hasn’t helped, since you answered a completely different question than the one I asked. Hopefully Amazon and Home Depot are on a performance contract with My Move, because they are getting exactly zero hits from anyone who is using Safari for Mac. And they can’t be happy about this indifference to a prime target because My Move can’t be bothered to clean up its email automation or pay a human a few dollars to actually read the emails.

UPDATE: Here’s an even better example. I needed a recommendation for a pool & spa service (in my hostile climate, we have to have a “closing” and drain the pipes for winter) and went to Angie’s list. I noticed that one of the reviews had an “F” which was clearly intended from the content to be an “A”. Unlike Yelp, there’s no way to flag a review or give feedback on it so I wrote an email to support using their online form. Here’s the reply; note that has nothing to do with my concern and also contains a number of grammatical errors:

Thank you for contacting Angie’s List. 
We do apologize that you were not able to use the one of the recommended services in your area. For the reviews, we rely on our members feedback. We advised them to be as accurate as they can and non biased as for the work performed by the companies enlisted with us.
Let us know if you have any other questions, or visit the 24/7 Angie’s List support site for additional help. Don’t forget, if you have any home maintenance or improvement projects coming up, you can save time and money by shopping at  AngiesList.
Thanks again. Have a great day!

See what I mean? You too, dear reader. Have a great day.