Marketing – Page 58 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Tips for Creating Loyalty

Although I subscribe to Business Week, I somehow missed this article on creating and maintaining loyal customers. The folks at Church of the Customer Blog caught it and provided the link.Their original post appears here.

To me, the most powerful tip had to do with some of the things we’re tempted to do in order to sneak a few extra profits:

Don’t treat your customers as if they were expendable. Companies that break the Golden Rule by misleading, coercing, and disrespecting their customers effectively turn them into detractors. Examples in today’s world are countless, but they include nuisance fees and hidden charges, poor in-store service, and dreaded automated customer help lines. Such mistreatment causes customers to switch to competitors, cut back on their purchases, and, worst of all, warn others to stay away from the company.

My favorite recent example was the “spa use fee” that two different Scottdsale hotels saw fit to add to my bill at a conference. $15 a night in one, $13 a night in the other. In their “defense”, it was in the fine print in my reservation after I booked it. But geez, guys, if you’d told me it was $154 a night I would have paid without complaint. Telling me it’s $139 and then sticking me is dirty pool.

Can’t Afford a Focus Group?

You can create a customer panel. Done correctly, it’s inexpensive and can give you some great ideas on what you’re doing right, and what you can do better.

Thanks go to the folks at the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, who featured this on their blog.

Cell Phone Ads

I was working for the New York Mets when the first signs went up behind home plate. Invisible to fans in the ballpark, they were extremely visible to the television audience. It was jarring to see the Armitron logo as Bobby Bonilla hit (although, frankly, Bonilla was more irritating than the sign). Fans wrote angry letters, and sportwriters wrote angry columns.

And then everyone got used to it and moved on.

The signs stayed, and are now in every ballpark. Walk into any arena, and there are signs everywhere you can put a sign. The bowl games all have title sponsors. The arenas have corporate names. There are ads on shopping carts, fire trucks, bathroom walls.

Now comes the next frontier — ads on your cell phone. And Seth Godin’s not happy. Neither am I — it will make my job that much harder. Consumers are confronted with a greater onslaught of advertising every year. They react by filtering more and more of it out, which makes it tougher for the campaigns I create to get past the filters.

But the cell phone ads are coming, no matter how many angry letters we write. Unless…

Unless, when Verizon starts doing it, everyone dumps Verizon and goes to Cingular. And if Cingular tries it, everyone dumps them and goes to Sprint.

That’s asking a lot of the American consumer, who has passively sat back and accepted every other intrusion. More likely, we’ll all complain. And then we’ll get used to it and move on.

Do We Really Give Good Service?

Today, Seth Godin tackles the issue of customer service. It’s his position that most of of us have given great service, and that’s why we’re so upset at bad service.

I’m not convinced. I think most of us think we do, but we’re kidding ourselves. We talk a good game, with mission statements, memos from the CEO, and the like. But many corporate mantras are accompanied, out of the public eye, with orders to cut expenses. So head count gets slashed, and training gets eliminated, and we’re left with an overwhelmed, poorly trained, unmotivated front line.

And then the marketing department tells the ad guy that “our people make the difference.”