Or maybe they weren’t.  I’m always paying attention to how companies interact with their customers relative to their brand and what it stands for, and if they are doing so congruently in all the places they interact. So imagine my surprise when I was the personal recipient of several unsolicited e-mails from the Princeton Review and after several reads and determining it was ‘not for me,’ simply went to unsubscribe. Now I had no beef with getting the e-mails because I could see how I might have fit their profile or been interested in the subject they were emailing about. But it wasn’t for me and with no judgment or frustration I just wanted off.

I twice followed the link to unsubscribe and when I hit the unsubscribe button it took me to their homepage which offered no possibility of unsubscribing. Ten minutes of clicking through their website, I got sick of trying to unsubscribe and feeling like I’d wasted enough time doing so I forwarded my message to my EA and asked her to work it out. So the customer that simply wanted off, with no frustration for having been emailed in the first place, started getting frustrated.

Two days later I get an email (along with about 30 other individuals who apparently wanted to unsubscribe and shared my position on the open cc: line) which said in a somewhat terse tone:

“Hello, In order to unsubscribe please do not click on the link, but paste your email address you would like unsubscribed into the url.”

It then proceeds to show us how to go about doing this and says if the email persists, please email me and gives the name of a person at The Princeton Review.

The e-mail and process were for real. The people who wanted off were too. They had email addresses from financial institutions, educational ones etc. I’m sure they didn’t want their emails blasted. I’m sure none of us wanted multiple attempts, e-mails and EAs involved. I’m sure we were surprised to see poor grammar in the body of the email instructions.  The Princeton Review? This was a bad brand experience.

All of our organizations can easily be guilty of this type of thing and at Outsell I know we don’t always get it right either. But every CEO needs to click on their websites, call 1-800 numbers, cold-call sales and dial their own (and their front office lines and helpdesk lines.) Every person needs to be trained to do the same thing and be vigilant about getting outside themselves, their cubicles, computer screens and phones and get into ‘the other guys’ shoes, cubicles, computer screens and phones and listen from their point of view about what it’s like to interact with the organization. I’m sorry it requires out of body experiences but in this day and age it’s imperative to live, eat, and breathe the customer’s point of view and make sure what they experience from the organization is a brand-building, fanactical customer loyalty and positive word of mouth building experience!

Share & Save

I was reading Bon Appetit magazine and noticed a two-page ad from Adventures by Disney. It was brilliantly done. It showed people laughing and having a good time in a really dramatic looking town scene with a man in costume pointing. He was clearly the tour guide, doing his job well. Below the two-page photo across the bottom of both pages were one-word city locations running across the bottom like a ticker tape. London, New York, Vienna, Sydney, Paris, Banff, Shanghai, Machu Piccho, Killarney, Tuscany, Galapagos, Jackson Hole, Heidelberg, Capetown, Galapagos and on it went. I was drawn in. I wanted to go. But then I noticed an interesting thing.  The description: “Now is the time to live the stories of 23 of the world’s truly amazing destinations. With Adventures by Disney you’ll get to the heart of every locale…” It went on to describe VIP access to experiences difficult to do on one’s own, the ability to have ‘incredible fun’ and all hosted by Disney-trained Adventure Guides. They’d see to every detail “so it’s easy for you to be a part of this planet’s most wondrous stories.”

Fun, easy, entertaining, adventurous, special, VIP, exciting, wondrous. They used a pretty good list of adjectives and hit all the right hot buttons, including living up to Richard Saul Wuhrman’s famous dictum to make information entertaining and entertainment informative. Somehow you got the point that you could leave it up to Disney, and their trusted brand, that knows how to deliver a high-quality good time, and go have the trip of your life. All this with one big photo, one powerful list, about 75 words and one mega brand.

Oh, and they used consistent branding – Their famous Disney logo looked the same as it always does, even when used within the larger logo for Adventures by Disney. They refer to Disney Adventures and Disney Travel Services, Inc. and when they invoked the name they invoked everything people have come to know, experience, feel, and think about their brand.

Powerful stuff. Brands have power when they’re managed, used and invoked consistently. Too many information companies have brands by the thousands no experience associated with them, and no attachment that really invokes passion and feeling. Bloomberg has done a great job of creating a status symbol with their brand (I need my Bloomberg terminal.) Google has been incredibly consistent and is a great example of using its name everywhere and consistently, starting w/ Google on the home page and then Google Enterprise, Google Knol, Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google News and so forth.
Most business people ‘get’ the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times and what it invokes. Vogue, Cosmo, Time, and Life conjure images. But that’s about where it stops.  Do people love their Thomson Reuters?  Their Gartner? Their IBISWorld? Does working with those companies produce consistent and positive images that are managed as a brand experience?  Business information doesn’t have to mean boring information and Disney inspires.

Speaking of all of this, a recent article in the WSJ does a great job profiling Disney’s foray into English-language instruction in China as this niche industry booms. Brilliant branding and brand extensions.

Share & Save

We hear from a lot of enterprise content buyers about what they don’t like about working with vendors or what “contracts from hell” look and feel like. Here are a few things that will annoy customers. Hint: this is not a good climate in which to be annoying.

• Forced bundling.
• Arbitrary price increases where no discernible value is added to the product.
• Having a near monopolistic position and invoking bullet number two with a take it or leave it stance.
• Having salespeople that don’t return phone calls and/or invoke both items 3 and 2 while making no bones about it and while not returning calls.
• Integrating products and brands by “name” after myriad acquisitions but leaving the back-office pieces, like separate contracts, usage reporting, invoicing, and customer relationship management, non-integrated with the customer having to pick up the pieces.
• Not being able to invoice in local currency, or defining users and user groups (for pricing purposes) by geographic or worse physical location. We even heard of one company that sends out separate invoices per user! Note: according to Tom Friedman the world is flat and the only companies that can’t integrate invoices these days are phone and cable companies. Everyone else needs to be in the 21st century.
• Attorneys that negotiate contracts who act and sound like frustrated prosecuting attorneys. Customers are not adversaries and behaving like a Rottweiler (a breed I happen to love by the way) is not a good idea.

It’s hard to believe some of this is going on in this day and age but truth be told, some of the largest companies are the biggest offenders and in this era of duopolies in almost every segment and sub-segment of the industry customers are going to start biting back. We’ve been saying that as prices increase, budgets decrease, and the top 2, 3 and 4 vendor positions get staked out, we’re going to be competing on different battlegrounds (think experience) and market share will be won or lost on how easy companies are to do business with, especially since the enterprises we are talking with are no longer willing to put up with duplication. It’s a luxury they can no longer afford even when multiple points of view are important. They’ll get the multiple points of view from other than the top 2 or 3 market share leaders (in duplicate or triplicate). Customers – please send along suggestions for “what does the ideal vendor and contracting and contract process look like.” As is often the case, people tend to talk more about what they don’t like vs. what they do like. So in the spirit of honey vs. vinegar – send along some honey and we’ll share your ideas!  Respond to this post, send an email, call, fax, or use a postage stamp. We’re all ears.

Share & Save

I wrote recently that companies will be battling it out for market share as budgets decrease and customers get more aggressive about duplicate resources and how they allocate their budgets. There are other pressures and trends coming into how money flow is moving in the industry that are important to point out.

1) The industry’s dirty little secret is that budgets for information come from three sources – advertisers, end users and their departments, and enterprise information managers or libraries.  For consumer information and entertainment substitute consumers and their households for end users and their departments. That’s it. And these sources are all budget driven – based on how the organization is performing and rarely do the budgets move more than up or down single-digit percentage points. It’s boring, it’s safe, and it’s stable.  So unless a publisher finds new budgets to go after (Corporate Executive Board did this brilliantly when it went after consulting budgets) it is displacing budget (aka going after market share) for existing and new product sales.

2) As we know advertisers are moving their “fixed” (and shrinking because they’re enterprise driven and enterprises are cutting back) budgets from print to digital at a time when their choices for where to place ads are proliferating like weeds in a field. Fewer dollars chasing more choices. Expect continued pressure on advertising for quite some time because even if ad budgets go back up a percent or two the choices are still outstripping the budgets.

3) In the areas of business and professional information, properties that are heavily reliant on advertising are wanting to make or buy their way in to subscription and transactional paid-content businesses.  Where they choose to ‘make’ it means more supply and competition into the market (chasing fixed budgets) which means continued pressure and like advertising more battles for market share.  Sidebar I:  we find it ironic that paid content has come back into vogue after the ‘all things ad-funded’ mentality that prevailed with all the hype that went with Google and the growth in search-advertising. We said ‘all things ad-funded would not survive’ given the fixed budget phenomenon we’ve been tracking AND that enterprises were investing in their own websites, shifting dollars out of advertising) but people can be like sheep, especially when chasing venture capital and hype won out (for the short term) once again. Sidebar II: Publishers who get into paid content notoriously mismanage the properties they acquire unless they leave them alone (leave them alone being the operative words).  They also notoriously undervalue the offerings because they come from ad-model roots where everything is low fee or free.  To high-end information providers you can read this as ‘they can wreck everything’.  This all points to more supply and cheap supply. At the time we are seeing reduced budgets.

4) To add insult to injury our survey data shows that end users and their departments are spending less on content and turning to their intranets much more as their first go-to place for information.  (Use of the internet as the first place to go has dropped from 79% in 2001 to 57% in 2008 as we reported in End-User Update: 2009 Overview ) and we are seeing more emphasis on centralized buying and procurement getting into the vendor portfolio management act and the advertising spending act. That means more pressure on budgets. All roads point to continued pressure on growth. Companies that are ‘winning’ (read growing) have market share leadership and respected brands, are easy to do business with, have real-time data and/or workflow solutions that are in the money or risk management flow of their customer’s businesses, or have digital solutions with unique and valued audiences and are delivering tactical solutions (read leads) to customers.

Share & Save

Throughout Outsell’s history, and frankly long before that,  I’ve been a fanatic about marketing. As an undergrad at Stanford, I left my journalism major behind and combined classes to create something as close to a marketing major as I could find since no such degree (even in business administration) existed.  I did an internship at DataQuest (a high-tech market research firm, then an ACNielsen subsidiary,) went to IBM for a short bit after graduation and then ended up back at DataQuest where, for whatever reason, my love of information services, technology, and marketing became intertwined and indelibly cast into the core of my career.

The marketing field has changed a tremendous amount since then and with the web it is changing marketing at warp speed.  Like a good house with old bones, or sticking with tried and true core values like integrity, the fundamentals of marketing are still sound. But how those fundamentals are being executed is constantly twisting and turning and in some cases being turned inside out.

Marc and I recently wrote about some of these changes in our CEO Topics about agile product innovation and marketing and how well our industry is doing and what’s needed to improve. Every day I have observations about how information companies are or aren’t marketing well and examples from outside the industry we can be learning from.  I watch how publishers and information providers are following the money (or not) and am seeing changes in how money is flowing (or not.) I am also observing how our marketing and advertising is changing (or not) and how marketing is affecting information (or not) and information is affecting marketing and the way the world’s enterprises are doing business well (or not.)

So let’s just say I have a lot to say on this topic and decided it was time to share these observations in a bigger and better way.  Please join the conversation.

Share & Save