Category: Marketing

Good CSR, bad CSR

The other day I got hot under the collar about what was basically a trivial matter. The outsourced customer service function of American Express needed appropriate phrases to express appropriate reactions when a customer called because their credit card was declined. Quite possibly because of cultural differences, the scripted responses weren’t appropriate at all.

But why would a company even want to banter with the customer in the first place? This is not a marriage or personal relationship where you are trying to gain the upper hand. There’s a customer service policy in place to handle whatever concern the customer is contacting you about. Just deal with it, as efficiently is possible. Don’t embellish the dialog in a way that can turn a neutral situation into a negative.

At the other end of the spectrum, if the customer has a complaint or request and your policy is to honor it, there is nothing wrong with an additional coating of obsequiousness. An example is this response from amazon.com when I downloaded a Kindle book thinking it was free through the Prime lending library and discovered I was charged for it.

First, let me apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue. I do understand how frustrating this must have been to you. We value our customers’ trust above all else–it is the foundation upon which Amazon.com was built. Please know that this situation was the result of a combination of technical and human errors, and that in no way did we intend for this to happen.

Over the top? You bet. Did it cost Amazon any more than a simple notice that my charge had been reversed? Not a penny. Will this make me more likely to give more money to Amazon? Absolutely.

Why copywriting is like selling (part 3)

Professional salespeople never forget they are selling to a human being, because that person is right in front of them. Copywriters, though, can become confused. They satisfy the requirement of filling a technical need, and forget there is a person signing the purchase order or keying in the credit card number. Unless personal emotional gratification is delivered, the sale may fall through because your solution is not perceived as relevant or important.

Why do buyers buy? Bob Stone, in his classic Successful Direct Marketing Methods, details the two categories of human wants: The desire to gain, and the desire to avoid loss.

Robert Collier, the “Giant of the Mails” who was at his peak in the 1930s, lists  six prime motives of human action:

  1. Love
  2. Gain
  3. Duty
  4. Pride
  5. Self-indulgence
  6. Self-preservation

And here are Roy Chitwood’s six buying motives:

  1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
  2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
  3. Comfort and convenience
  4. Security and protection
  5. Pride of ownership
  6. Satisfaction of emotion

Note that every one of these is EMOTIONAL…people buy emotionally, not logically. This is true even when selling business products to people in a business setting, because people are still people.

Next time: features, advantages and benefits.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

American Express customer service goes off the rails

Had a remarkable conversation with American Express customer service tonight regarding my account ending in 71000. (Amex, that’s so you can fix this if you are paying attention.) The card was rejected in a Cost Plus World Market store and while I am by no means a paragon of any type, I’ll say in my defense I have never missed a payment nor reported any kind of irregularity so it was a bit of a surprise.

When I got home there was an email, as opposed to the more urgent phone call you might expect. There was a number for me to call. I did… and was put on hold. WTF! I then had a conversation with an overseas CSR. I am not one of the “keep it in America” folks by kneejerk reaction, but in this case the language barrier might have kept her from realizing some of the script she was reading from was of a toxic nature.

I see you are calling from a number in your profile, you had a charge that was rejected because of our fraud prevention alerts. I asked why, since Cost Plus is a recognized national retailer. First surprise in her scripted answer: the larger the organization, the greater for the potential for fraud. Oh, says I, are you saying I should only shop at small stores from now on? Her response: I can see you were embarrassed sir, when your card was rejected. (WTF! I never said that!) I can understand that because of the prestige attached to the American Express card. (Yes, I’m a desperate striver who was accidentally approved for this card. Now my dirty laundry is out in public.)

I could have been reassured by this conversation, but instead I’m in doubt about my choice of shopping destinations and my worthiness to carry the card… which you can’t bet I won’t be doing much longer. Well, that’s not actually true because I have points to redeem. But you can bet this puppy is going to stay in my pocket the balance of this holiday shopping season. Don’t have time for this shit.

Why copywriting is like selling (Part 2)

Copywriters are at their most creative when trying to wriggle out of doing the work at hand. As with the professional salespeople I talked about in my last post, applying a system or methodology to an informal process can help you stay focused. It can also insure that you are not overshooting any decision points in the mind of your reader.

Advertising guidebooks are full of acronymic checklists to verify your copy has a logical flow, such as these three taken from Bob Bly’s excellent The Copywriter’s Handbook:

AIDA = Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
ACCA = Awareness, Comprehension, Conviction, Action
4 Ps = Picture, Promise, Prove, Push

In each case the process is to make a connection with your audience, then present your selling argument, then go for the sale or other action. If you look at failed advertising, often the problem is that the copywriter got the sequence mixed up—for example, leaping to a sales pitch before you’ve hooked the reader in, or asking for the order before you’ve demonstrated the value of what you have to sell.

My favorite checklist is the one taught by my old client Max Sacks International, and it is something I regularly use in auditing my own work. Since this was developed for use by professional salespeople, I’ll add a translation for copywriters.

  1. Approach. How are you going to open the dialog? What will you do to engage your audience?
  2. Qualification. Make sure the prospect does have buying authority; for copywriters, hopefully the media department has done this job for you.
  3. Agreement on need. Make it clear what you’re talking about, then define a problem to be solved. Easy to do in a face to face environment where you can see a head nod, much harder in the remote medium of copywriting where you have to visualize audience reaction.
  4. Sell the company. If the prospect doesn’t find the salesperson or the company credible, they aren’t going to buy no matter how appealing the pitch. That’s why you sell the company before presenting your offer. For copywriters this is done with presentation and tone as much as with specific statements.
  5. Fill the need. Here is the meat of your selling proposition, presented only AFTER every other requirement has been met.
  6. Act of Commitment. Ask for the order. Tell your reader specifically what you want them to do, and emphasize how easy and risk-free it is to do it.
  7. Cement the sale. A salesperson will reiterate the commitment that has been made so the new customer does not cancel as soon as they leave the office. A copywriter will do this throughout the message.

Next: why people buy.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

Why copywriting is like selling (Part 1)

One of my earliest clients was a guy named Roy Chitwood who owned Max Sacks International, a sales training organization. In working with Roy for several years I attended so many workshops that his catch phrases became drilled into my brain. On the value of training: “School is never out for the sales professional.” On the role of the sales department in the organization: “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.”  On the importance of planning: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which road you take.”

Unlike copywriting, personal selling is a contact sport. Salespeople have to psych themselves up to get over rejection and put on their best face for the next appointment. Having an organized system to apply to what may appear an informal activity helps them stay on task (“Once selling becomes a process, it ceases to be a problem”).  This may why there are so many sales training courses and methods; most of the students I met in Roy’s classes had taken several courses from different trainers and used them agnostically for inspiration.

Very much like copywriters, salespeople have the job of getting prospects excited about and desirous of a product or service they may not have realized they needed until a moment ago. That’s why it is so helpful to apply the “rules” followed by professional salespeople to your own work as a copywriter. In my class, I spend quite a bit of time on the copywriting/selling analogy and I’m going to do the same here, over the next several posts.

The relationship between copywriting and selling should be seamless in a well-run company: your lead generation efforts serve as the front end of the sales effort, and serve up a steady stream of prospects (or “suspects” as another mentor, Ray Jutkins, used to call them since they have not yet entered your sales process). The better you’ve done your job, the more interested they will be in learning more about your company’s product or service.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

Marketing in an Optum haze

Optum is a new entity cobbled together out of previously separate entities for medical billing, online pharmacy, health newsletters and other services to “help navigate the health care system”. The name was trademarked in February 2011, but I just came across it last week in an expensive inside front cover spread in the New Yorker prescribing “to improve the health care system from A to Z, start with O”.

The pharma industry has a way of coming up with invented names that sound like they mean something but actually don’t. “Abilify” and “Boniva” being a couple of my favorites. I expect the naming committee at this company must have had a chest bump moment after they realized they could create a new word simply by chopping the middle out of “optimum”.

But I think there are reasons that “Optum” remained available long after “Humana” and “Zoloft” had been gobbled up. First, two-syllable words that end in “um” tend to sound mundane, downbeat and occasionally risible when spoken, instead of soaring. Try pablum, problem and yes, rectum.

Second, as we’ve mentioned previously, the lazy or hurrying reader often misplaces letters and sees in one word another similar word that isn’t there. In this case my eye immediately placed the missing “i” where “t” was written in the ad, making for a most unfortunate result (at least for a medical company).

Words have the power to sell, but also the potential to hurt your marketing efforts. When one of those words is the name of your company, that’s an extra big problem.

Robert California jumps the shark on “The Office”

I was irrationally exuberant about the Robert California character on the revamped The Office, replacing Steve Carell as the office manager (OK, technically he’s now the CEO of the company, Linda Hunt apparently having bailed on that role). Played by the great James Spader, California first showed up as an interviewee for the job last spring. He seemed like a cube-dweller’s existential nightmare, somebody who had no idea who he was or why he was there but was designed to unsettle the person he was talking to in a very laid back, California way.

The first couple of shows this season were some of my all time favorites on The Office… including a Halloween episode in which he prowled the office gathering each employee’s worst fears, then told a horror story that incorporated all those fears. But that was also the show where he brought his kid to work, and now he’s taken to attending employee off-duty parties and making self aware statements like “you don’t know me at all, do you?” Robert California has jumped the shark.

There’s a lesson in this for marketers. The producers didn’t just decide out of the blue to emasculate the character. They must have done lots of audience testing that told them viewers were confused by “the boss” (and everybody knows that stereotype) behaving in such an unpredictable way. It made them nervous so it had to be changed. Similarly, sometimes our best copy and creative ideas are just too weird for our prospects and we have to bite our tongues and pull back to the tried and true.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Maybe James Spader can be persuaded to do a one man show based on the “real” Robert California.

Why you shouldn’t apologize to your reader

Here are two very different direct mail efforts that make the same mistake: apologizing to the reader. They don’t come right out and say “I’m sorry”, but the self-effacing entry points have the same effect. And by choosing this approach for their entry they’ve given up the opportunity to have another, much stronger intro.

Waste Management self-mailer

Waste Management says “We know this is the last thing on your mind… but it’s the first thing on ours.” With the reveal of the opening trash can lid. Well, no. If it’s the last thing on my mind then why are you talking about it? If I don’t care about it then I am not going to read your promo about it.

The Fresh Air Fund sent me an address sticker package to solicit money to send inner city kids to camp. There’s actually some good copy here but not the first sentence of the letter: “With winter fast approaching, it may seem like an odd time to talk about giving inner-city kids a bus ticket to Fresh Air camp.” Well, yes it does. Maybe you should come back and talk to me in the spring.

Fresh Air Fund sticker sheet
Fresh Air Fund sticker sheet

Or maybe you should lead with the stronger second sentence: “With your help, inner-city children will have the opportunity to leave behind the crowded apartments and dangerous streets they call home and join us next summer.” Or, maybe turn the timing of the appeal into a motivator: “We have to work all year long to make sure that inner city kids have the chance to spend a few summer weeks at camp. That’s why we’re writing you today.”

What’s happening in both these efforts is that the copywriter is implicitly apologizing for the intrusion. But the reader doesn’t care because advertising mail is a lower life form than a cockroach. All the reader wants to do is throw it away. And all you can do to save yourself is to deliver a powerful offer or a truly intriguing proposition that will interrupt that trajectory toward the recycling bin. The Uriah Heep act just doesn’t cut it.

Mahatma Gandhi on customer service

I saw this on a poster at my local purveyor of Indian goods and had to check out its veracity:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

The quote is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Ludicrous. Or is it? A search turns up both corroboration and skepticism. My money is with the denier who reports the quote actually came from Zig Ziglar, who says Gandhi said it.

Gotta love the internets.

UPDATE: the reference to Zig Zigler is oddly gone from the skeptic link above, replaced by one attributing the quote to L.L. Bean. Also, several people have mentioned that the quote universally ascribed to a speech Gandhi made in South Africa in 1890, but he didn’t actually arrive in South Africa in 1893.

What happens when your viral video doesn’t go viral?

You put your heart and soul and best marketing smarts into a YouTube video campaign expecting it will go viral and quickly spread across the globe. And… not all that much happens. That’s disheartening but a useful object lesson.

In my little town of Saratoga Springs, NY, the Chamber of Commerce decided to make a promotional video in which thousands of local citizens are captured by a roving camera as they lip sync to a medley of songs from the pop group Train. (Local connection: Train’s drummer hails from Saratoga.) The C of C was up front about the fact that they wanted to emulate the success of a similar video from the city of Grand Rapids, MI which has gotten over 10 million hits.


The Saratoga video is now live, and in the first week, it’s gotten about 36,000 hits. That’s about what you might expect if each of the people in the video sent the link to a few of their friends. By comparison, surveillance videos of a couple of drunks knocking over a statue of a horse (Saratoga is a horse racing town) have gotten over 100,000 hits. Of course, things could change but as local blog All Over Albany points out, most of the traffic to the horse video happened in the first few days after the video went live.

A comparison of the Saratoga and Grand Rapids videos yields some ideas of what works in viral and what may not so work so well.

First of all, the Saratoga piece is obviously a promotional effort. It opens with the producer’s logo, and the first few seconds are archival footage of a thoroughbred race. Many of the participants throughout are waving signs or wearing logos to promote their own organizations. That’s fine for civic pride, but maybe less so for attracting interest from those who don’t already know you. Second, the Train music is just not that good or that catchy; critics have complained that many participants don’t appear to be lip syncing but the songs aren’t really sync-able.

By comparison, the Grand Rapids video has a “wow” factor both in the choice of scenes (including pillow fighters, zombies, an outrageously hamming mayor and a quick pan to what looks like the entire police and fire departments driving down the street waving in unison) and the “how did they do that?” production which looks like a single take. (It isn’t; you can get details in “The Making of the Grand Rapids Lip Dub” which itself has over 112,000 hits.)

It also has great music which ties into a heart-tugging storyline. The video was made to dispel the image of Grand Rapids as just another dying smokestack city, and the music fits in perfectly: a 10 minute concert version of Don McLean’s elegiac “Bye Bye Miss American Pie.” Which, ironically, was penned as McLean was sitting in a bar right here in Saratoga.

I’m a member of the Saratoga Springs Chamber of Commerce myself and would like this video to become successful. My first suggestion is to remove the producer credit and stock footage and to start with Sam the Bugler strutting toward us. Second, now that everybody’s had their moment in the sun try some creative editing of some “best of” clips like local celebrity Garland Nelson in the park, really selling it. Third, sponsor a competition for local citizens (or anyone who wants to try their hand on YouTube) to remix or even parody the original… some very interesting things can happen when you do that.