No automated “Welcome to Wistia!” emails for me to instantly delete.  Just a quick message from a real person.  And the kind gesture of giving out his cell phone number in case I have any problems seals the deal.  I’m not going to call that number (why would I?), but the fact that he gave it to me establishes a greater sense of trust in the service itself.  And yes, I know he copies and pastes that to everyone who signs up.  I don’t care.  It still works because it’s unique.

Of course, this is a very mild example of injecting the human element into customer service.  Video hosting is not exactly something where people need constant reassurance that support is readily available.  But there are great opportunities for other industries where this concept, taken to a higher level, would be much more effective.

For instance, let’s say you’re uninsured and need open heart surgery.  You can’t afford the procedure in the U.S., so you’re thinking about getting treatment overseas.  This is extremely scary for you and feels incredibly risky, even after you do extensive research on the best doctors and hospitals in various countries.  But then one of your potential overseas doctors emails you, proposing a video conference call (instead of a phone call) to discuss the procedure and go over any questions you might have.  You decide to do the video call, and get to talk with your doctor face-to-face.  You hear his voice, see his smile, and you grow to trust him.  He’s no longer a set of credentials on a website — he’s a real person who’s going to take good care of you.  Done deal.

Any customer that feels a large degree of uncertainty wants to be convinced that, if things go wrong, they’ll be in good hands.  They want to know that real people care about them, not just some hired worker who’s being paid $7/hour to read a script.  So erase their doubts and show them your face.

Twelve years ago we started off as a small fast-food restaurant, in a dumpy looking building.  Today we are a thriving small business and one of the most popular places for Aggies to eat, in our same dumpy looking building.   Our tables and booths don’t exactly match, our landscaping looks terrible and our building is not exactly sturdy, but our chicken fingers are why people come.

Their menu?

• Chicken Finger plate
• Chicken Finger sandwich
• Chicken Finger club sandwich
• Grilled chicken sandwich
• French fries
• Potato salad
• Texas toast

And if you think specialization is only a practice reserved for smaller restaurants, Jen points out Raising Cane’s.  From their Wikipedia page:

The restaurant offers fried chicken fingers as its only main course. Raising Cane’s total revenue in 2007 was $97.3 million.

Seems like it’s a lot more profitable* to be known as the only one that does what you do, rather than simply trying to be the best.

(Or it could just be the chicken fingers.)

*Note: “A lot more profitable” is wrong.  “Can be just as profitable” is a bit less simplistic.

• Hamburgers
• Hot dogs
• Philly cheesesteaks
• Grilled chicken
• Chicken strips
• Popcorn chicken
• Potato salad
• Macaroni salad
• Coleslaw
• Garden salad
• Mac and cheese wedges
• Jalapeno poppers
• Cheese stix
• Fried mushrooms
• Fried zucchini
• Funnel cake
• Apple pie

But of course!  They’re called Wingman, so why wouldn’t they be serving fried zucchini?

“Oh they’ll come for the wings, but they’ll stay for the apple pie!”

This is obviously stupid just from a financial perspective, as they’re wasting money on ingredients they use for 10% of the orders.  And it slows down their order times drastically because new customers are suddenly overwhelmed with an abundance of choice that they didn’t expect (probably not a huge problem, as the place isn’t very popular).  But what aggravates me most is that THEY’RE CALLED WINGMAN, yet they serve uninteresting foods that have never been associated with wings.

“But Charlie, maybe they get orders for outdoor corporate events!  It’s always good to have potato salad at the company picnic, LOL!”

Of course they get bulk orders from time-to-time — all restaurants do — but that doesn’t mean they should accommodate every buyer’s random needs.  Just because some of your customers love apple pie, it doesn’t mean it should be on the menu.

Why are they even serving salads?  To accommodate vegetarians?  SCREW VEGETARIANS!  If you don’t eat meat, why the hell are you in a restaurant called Wingman?  Put up a big sign that says, “Want salad?  Go back to Whole Foods, hippie.”  Then pelt them with frozen chicken wings as they run out.

Nothing pisses me off more than a good product or service that gets completely diluted because the owners wanted to please everyone.

So polarize the crowd.  Instead of matching your competitors’ offerings, veer in a different direction that everyone else is too afraid of.  Stop adding, and start taking things away.  It’s far more interesting when choices are reduced, and people are excluded.

Source: GoComics.com

“There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” – Joshua Reynolds

When a baby bird gets hungry, it stares up at its mom expectantly, beak opened wide, and begins chirping incessantly until it has been fed.  The baby is either unable or unwilling to go out and retrieve food for itself.  Why do all the hard work when someone else can do it for you?

When customers are faced with a challenge — a gap in their knowledge, a website that’s not intuitive to navigate, a set up process that’s too complex to get through, etc. — they quickly resort to the state of a baby bird.  Suddenly, they’ve been made to feel inadequate.  They get frustrated and become unwilling / unable to move on.

“Why isn’t this easier?”

“Can’t someone just do this for me?”

“Ah, forget it!”

You have two options when this happens:

1. Screw ‘em. Also known as “The Microsoft Approach.”  You’ve got them locked into your business, right?  They bought your stuff, and you got what you wanted.  If they can’t fill in the gaps, they must just be stupid.
2. Spoon-feed ‘em. Accept that whatever they’re complaining about is probably your fault, and go out of your way to fix the problem.

The duty of your company is to make it painless for your “baby birds” to eat.  More often than not, that requires you to spoon-feed them.  It may take more effort on your part, but it keeps your customers happy.

An interesting example of a company that spoon-feeds their customers is Ted’s Montana Grill.  At any other restaurant, the bill would come at the end of the meal, with the sum total of everyone’s meals, and the entire group would struggle to calculate how much each of them owed.  Cash is exchanged, tip calculators are whipped out, and there’s always that one jerk (me) who only has a credit card.  Figuring out how to split the bill is an ordeal.  At Ted’s, it isn’t.

Click the image to enlarge.

A $75 bill, nicely divided into four sections showing what each person ordered and how much it cost.  You know exactly how much you owe without having to think about it or argue with your friends.  As Larry David said, no one wants to do math after eating a meal.  Ted took that to heart.

It might seem fairly trivial to do something like this.  There’s no impact on the bottom line.  But it’s an unexpected surprise, and it leaves your customers feeling happy.  Spoon-feeding them this kind of information might be a bit harder on you, but it’s better for your company to take on some pain than to pass it on to the people who buy from you.

Never underestimate how much people desire to be spoon-fed.

“PC makers in the Windows camp have done everything possible to make their products progressively worse by cutting corners to save pennies per unit and boost sales volume.  There’s good reason Apple is seeing healthy profits while grabbing market share.  It refuses to budge on quality and so charges a higher price. Rather than running ads that seem clever at first but really aren’t, the Windows guys ought to take the hint and just build better computers.”

The best companies — the ones who retain their brand equity while consistently increasing their bottomline — all think relentlessly long-term.  They know that marketing means absolutely nothing if you have a bad product.  So start allocating all of your ad money into the R&D department.  You can get a lot farther on free word-of-mouth than with a multi-million dollar TV campaign.

Quality first, marketing later.

Thanks to Andy for the tip.

He went around in bars, talking to groups of people about their fears and regrets.  He’d also ask them about what their life was like (their job, their living situation, etc.)  Then he would sit at the bar and write, letting the most common or unique answers shape characters and parts of the story.  Those answers were things like: being a grown man who’d never been in a fight, wanting to quit a worthless 9-5 job, self-loathing for getting caught up in a materialistic society, lacking a father figure, and being a caterer and pissing into the rich customers’ food.

Notice what Palahniuk didn’t do.  He didn’t go around to bookstores and libraries, asking people what they liked or didn’t like about his previous books.  He didn’t ask what kind of story people wanted to hear.  Instead, he tried to understand what makes people tick.  He tried to understand what all of us have in common, and how we can relate: through our fears, regrets, and stories.  He also brilliantly did his research in the most candid environment (pubs) rather than in a well-lit, controlled market research firm.

This is why his story resonated with such a large group of people – he had an abundance of empathy.

Don’t ask people what they want, or how they think you could improve your product.  People are idiots, and they all have their own selfish agenda.  They don’t care about your vision; they care about themselves.

Instead, try to understand the environment they live in.  It may seem trite, but you have to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and find out where they’re coming from.  What are the things that bother them on a daily basis?  What do these people have in common with each other?  What stories do they have to tell?  What do they hate about the current way things are done?  And why have they grown accustomed to it?

The answers to those questions will give you real insight, not focus group insight.

——

And all marketing talk aside, if you haven’t seen and read Fight Club, shame on you.  Both the movie and the book are incredible.  How often does that happen?

The problem with this is that it doesn’t work.  As soon as you give the advice, you’ve created a hierarchy where you’re the sage and they’re the lowly idiot.  And despite your good intentions, your friend will mentally shut you down.  If you had just listened, you could have slowly moved your friend towards the right answer.  They would have learned the lesson on their own (or so they think), and it would have been a hundred times more powerful than you just telling them what to do.

The same thing happens in advertising.  A company tells us what to think instead of letting us figure it out on our own.  It’s patronizing, so we block it out.

That’s why marketing is different.  Advertising is forcing your message onto someone, while marketing is about listening and gently guiding people to find answers on their own.

Even if they wouldn’t have found those answers without your help.

This is a cheap and easy way to stack the deck in your favor as soon as the book is released.

This contest is one of the best marketing ideas I’ve ever come across.  Here’s why it works so well:

1. It makes everyone obsess over the destination. Before this, I’d never really considered going to the Great Barrier Reef.  I’ve always wanted to travel around Australia, but I never thought much about the GBR.  Now I’m looking at pictures of it, seeing how beautiful it is, and actually doing research on what it’s like.  One of the more brilliant requirements in the application process is that you have to prove your knowledge of the GBR.  So think of the thousands of people who are taking time out of their day to willingly learn as much as they can about it and then parroting that information in their video.
2. The prize is extremely remarkable. Therefore, it’s worth talking about.  The “wow” factor is that the winner will be paid a very large sum of money to just have a blast in the GBR for six months.  The money they’ll spend paying the lucky winner will be made back many times over in the long run.
3. They’re attracting all the right people. What kind of people do you think apply for this?  Travel nuts.  Basically, people who are both open and willing to go to Australia.  Even after the winner is announced and the thousands of other applicants lose, you can bet they will all still want to go down there.  In fact, it’s probably the number one place to vacation now for many of them.
4. Insanely high number of applicants/visitors. From their twitter account: “14,500 applications from 176 countries, < 3 million people have visited islandreefjob.com viewing more than 20 million pages!”  All these people tell their friends and watch each other’s videos.  And because they’re doing it on Youtube, the videos will be stumbled upon and rediscovered for a long time.
5. Applicants do all the marketing. Instead of shoving an ad campaign down people’s throats, Queensland Tourism is doing something that makes people want to spread their marketing message for them.  Even the selection process markets the GBR.  How? They left room for one “wildcard,” i.e. the person whose video gets the most votes.  So every applicant will be frantically trying to get people to vote for them — friends, family, complete strangers…  Everyone in their periphery will suddenly have the GBR on their mind.  By the time this is all said and done, millions and millions of people will have found out about this contest solely through word-of-mouth.
6. The marketing campaign will last an entire year. They started this contest in January.  The winner will live in the GBR until December, and they’ll be doing blog posts every week about their experiences.  And you can bet Queensland Tourism will do everything they can to ensure the winner has an amazing time.  The blog will be nothing but a six month rave review for the area.  Cheap, yet super effective.
   

It’s not hard for your company to do something like this.  Naturally, any prize you offer will never be as sexy as the GBR.  But you can still look at the underlying principles of what Queensland Tourism is doing and use those in your next big marketing campaign.

There are still a few days left to apply, so give it a shot.  Some of the applicants have pretty solid videos (like this one – the ending is great) but most of them are boring and mediocre.

And yes, I did apply and will be posting my video on here soon.  I want to do a separate post for it and explain the process of how I came up with the idea, what other ideas I had, and how I actually created the video.