Category: Marketing/Branding

I received a phone call yesterday where the caller said he was from the Royal Bank of Canada (the bank I use) and they had a customer survey for me. I had a million things to do, but I asked how long it would take – I could spare a couple of minutes. He said the survey would take 10 to 13 minutes on average. I asked if there was some sort of incentive for doing the survey (maybe a month of no-fee banking?) and he sheepishly said no. I politely said that my time was worth something and declined to answer the survey. He seemed stunned that I wasn’t willing to give up 15 minutes of  my time (I tend to be rather…expressive when asked for my opinion) for nothing. I suspect that the majority of the people they get to answer these surveys are the kind of people who feel special when asked for their opinion – which would typically be the kind of person who’s not in any sort of leadership position at work or home life. I’d say even your average frazzled home-based mom with kids wouldn’t want to give up 15 minutes for no good reason. So who are the people who the Royal Bank is going to get their results from? Not a good cross-section of their customer base, that’s for sure.

If you’re doing a phone survey without any perks for the person answering the questions, it should be a short, under-two-minutes survey. If you want someone to give up 15 minutes of their time, give them something…ANYTHING…to make it worth their while.

Sometimes I’m amazed at how poorly big companies can be at executing upon the simplest things. Future Shop, a big-box retail chain in Canada, sent out an email on the 13th warning customers about an email phishing attempt. That’s nice of them, but they violated one very important rule that all companies should follow when they warn customers about phishing attempts: they made their email look like a phishing email. The small thing was the lack of a FROM name – the email came in with no information about who it was from. The bigger thing was the URLs they were using for linking. Check out the screen shot below:

The easiest way to determine if something is a phishing attempt is to look at what URL the links are going to send you to – if it’s anything other than the companyname.com, you should be slightly concerned. When you mouse over an URL that’s typed out as www.futureshop.ca, you should see an URL that says www.futureshop.ca. When I looked at this, I thought to myself “What the heck is DCM5.com?” That’s sure not Futureshop.ca! The length of the URL was also raising a red flag – it was linking to an unknown domain, sure, but it also looked like it was linking to a script that would do something. I tried going to DCM5.com in my browser to take a peek, but it didn’t load, which is also suspicious.

Eventually I just clicked on one of the links, trusting in Firefox and Vista to protect me from anything seriously bad happening, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up taking me to a legitimate Futureshop.ca page about phishing. I suspect the DCM5.com URL is some sort of click-tracking service, but guess what: when you’re emailing your customers about an issue of security, tracking their clicks should be the last thing on your list.

I was watching a UFC show called “All Access” the other day – it’s a behind the scenes show that covers how UFC fighters train – and I noticed that the show had “Blue Chip” branding all over it.  I didn’t know what Blue Chip was, but later in the show they showed an URL for Blue Chip, evidently a sports collectible company.

Now here’s the funny part: www.bluechip.com loads a empty Web page related to something called the “Telamon Project Tracking System”. There’s no mention of Blue Chip anywhere. A first I thought I had made a typo in the URL, but that wasn’t the case. Next I thought “Ok, maybe it’s .net or something else” but a Google search for Blue Chip Sports failed to turn up any likely candidate that would have sponsored this UFC TV show. Was this some sort of typo in the domain? Or did BlueChip.com at one point have a sports collectible store, but they went out of business before the UFC show aired? Did they also have zero Google juice? That’s a bit hard to believe unless they started up this company last month.

At any rate, the lesson here is clear: if you’re going to sponsor a TV show, make sure they get your domain right, and that your company will last long enough to see some benefits from it.

Jeremy has put together a list of 10 tips for PR people that are working with bloggers, and it’s a great read. Here’s one of his tips:

“Do your homework.  Most blogs have an ‘about’ page, in which you’ll discover the blogger’s full-time job (assuming it isn’t blogging), region of the country/world where they live, topics they prefer to cover, how they’d like to be contacted (bonus tip: IM or email is almost always the answer, not the phone), etc.  Read this and understand it.  Furthermore, doing a little background research will quickly tell you whether or not the blogger is good at keeping secrets/embargos (some do, some don’t – learn the difference).”

I’ve received probably 100+ press releases from PR firms in the past 30 days leading up to CTIA, and it’s stunning how completely random and un-targeted they are. I can tell that 99.9% of the people sending them to me have never visited any of my sites, and know absolutely nothing about me or what kinds of things I cover. It’s no surprise then that I delete 99.9% of them without wasting my time reading them.

Jeremy also has a great post covering 10 tips for bloggers working with PR people, and it’s also a good read. Having a background in PR myself, I tend to know what the PR people want and don’t want – but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that #10 (Setting Expectations) is my biggest problem. I have a real struggle finding the discipline to write reviews in a timely, consistent manner – and more often than not I find myself apologizing to PR people for taking so damn long to write my reviews. It’s something I really wanted to improve upon in 2007, but I have to admit it’s proving to be harder than I thought. I’ll keep at it though!

I’ve been a VistaPrint customer for a few years now, mostly because they offer prices that can’t matched by anyone local – and the print quality is excellent. But I’m amazed at how often they send me “specials”. Just for fun I kept track of all of the messages I recieved from them over a nine day period:

Six messages over a nine day period? That’s an average of one message every 36 hours. They all pretty much contain the same deals as well – every one offers 99 cent business cards, so after a while (a short while) as a customer I don’t percieve their “specials” as being special at all. It’s like that store in the mall that has had a “90% Going Out of Business Sale” banner hung over their storefront for the past two years. The value of the marketing effort is diminished, if not destroyed, by over-use. And in some ways, it can even backfire: I’m starting to resent VistaPrint for their insanely high volume of email. I could unsubscribe from their mailing list – yes – but since I do order products from them every couple of months I’d have to sign up again and again. So instead I delete their messages as soon as I see them, without even looking, pausing only when I need their products. Hardly an ideal situation to put a long-term customer in, is it?

Ideally as a customer I’d like to control the frequency that I’m marketed to: if the company decides that sending out a promotion every 36 hours is good business for them, I’d like to recieve their best deals once ever two weeks. Give control to your customer and he’ll be more receptive to your marketing efforts.

Microsoft released some documentation for software developers recently, and their document on branding was an interesting read. Here’s a short quote:

“Branding is the emotional positioning of a product as perceived by its customers. Product branding is achieved through a combination of factors, including the product name and logo, use of color, text, graphics, and sound, the style of various other design elements, marketing, and most importantly, the attributes of the product experience itself. Successful branding requires skillful crafting of a product image, and is not achieved simply by plastering a product logo on every surface and using the product’s color scheme at every opportunity. Rather, meaningful and high quality branding that enhances users’ experience will be much more successful.”

Much of it is specific to Windows Vista and applications that will install into Windows Vista, but I’d say anyone creating a product should give this a read to help them think about what branding is, does, and why it’s so important. I wish more companies in the world understood the need to create great customer experiences from end to end. Companies often bemoan Apple’s success in many markets, and wonder why they can’t achieve the same thing – they could, if they paid attention to the customer experience and stopped letting engineers and software developers make all the decisions.

That’s a photo (nasty Treo 750 cameraphone!)  from the Switchfoot concert that Ashley and I went to on February the 21st. Switchfoot is a “crossover” band in that they’re started out in the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) scene and later made a splash in the mainstream music scene. So while they undoubtedly have a large fan base in the secular market now, a good chunk of their long-term fans are of the Christian variety. I first heard of Switchfoot a few years ago when someone I knew was doing a video project and used the song “Dare You To Move“. It’s a fantastic song with great lyrics and a killer hook. When I heard Switchfoot was coming to Calgary, I definitely wanted to go see them, so I bought some tickets (remember the Ticketmaster rant?).

A couple of weeks after I bought the Switchfoot tickets, I heard that one of my favourite bands of all time, Jars of Clay, was also coming to town – and that they were playing at MacEwan Hall at the University of Calgary, the same location as Switchfoot. My first thought was that they were playing the same show, because it made sense: two CCM bands, albet one more mainstream than the other. The curious part was that the show time was 30 minutes apart, and each band was selling separate tickets. I called Ticketmaster to try and get some details, and they couldn’t figure it out either how two bands could be listed at the same location at nearly the same time, but have two separately ticketed events.

I went to the show that night honestly not sure if I was going to see one band or two. When we got there it became clear: Switchfoot was playing in the bigger ballroom at MacEwan Hall, and Jars of Clay was playing a smaller venue within the same building.  So here I was, a fan of both bands, unable to see both concerts because they were happening at the same time. I quite honestly would have paid another $71.90 (two tickets) to see Jars of Clay later that night. Instead I felt conflicted that I had two non-refundable tickets to see Switchfoot, and couldn’t go see Jars of Clay without tossing out the $71.90 I’d alreay paid for the tickets and paying that much again to see Jars of Clay. In retrospect I wish I would have seen Jars of Clay – it would have been worth eating the $71 cost to me.

Why would the event planners make a decision like that, pitting two similar bands, with similar fan bases, against each other? They sacrificed what could have been a golden opportunity to earn more money by creating a mini-festival and charging more for the tickets. Someone wasn’t thinking like a marketing person should.

There’s nothing worse than running a technology news site, seeing a bit of news about something important, going to the official company Web site to look for the press release in their media section, and not finding anything other than old press releases. What possible excuse is there for the press release section of a major corporation to not be updated immediately when a press release is sent out?

I’ve seen this happen time and time again, and even when I get a press release by email I’ll usually want to link to the full thing online. When I email the PR person back asking them where it is on their Web site, the response I usually get is “Oh, we’ll have it up in a few days”. Not acceptable in the world we live in today.

Every now and then I’ll see a commercial on TV that strikes me as being particularly catchy or effective. CTV, a local TV station in my area, has created one that I thought blended a great song with great visuals. Lots of recognizable faces means a strong branding pull for CTV.

UPDATE: I’ve deleted it from Soapbox because I got a DMCA copyright violation notice from when I posted it on YouTube, so I expect I would have gotten another one for the Soapbox posting. A post on this later.