John Winsor

Shure Gets an A!

I had just poured a bowl of cereal this morning when my cell phone rang. It was Patrick Kilroy, Shure's VP of Global Marketing. He said he wanted to solve my problem I posted about yesterday and introduced me to Scott Sullivan, Shure's Senior Director Product Development, Personal Audio Products on the conference call. Pat explained to me that he had only been at Shure for two weeks and Scott had a lot more experience to solve my problem.

Scott then walked me through the steps he was planning on taking to solve my problem. An hour later I recieved this email from Scott:

"As we discussed this morning on the phone I am sending you my contact and shipping information. I have included our federal express number please use this when shipping this package to me and state on the federal express paperwork to bill recipient. I will be contacting you as soon as we receive your product back. The next steps for us are to quickly review over your previous and your latest returned earphones and determine what was the root cause of the problems, and then get back you with the best solution that meets your needs. If you need anything or have any other issue please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks for your patience in this matter and I look forwarding to talking with you soon."

Pat and Scott's timely interaction and "let's solve the problem" attitude is inspirational and something we can all learn from.

Thanks, Pat and Scott. You are stars!

I am now a life long customer!

More Nike Headbutts

Following up on my Nike Blockhead post I found this viral video entitled "Materazzi Training," appearing on YouTube, that further riffs on the Zidane headbutt . Maerazzi is tough!

Shure Thing?

About a year ago I was trying to figure out why my iPod earbud headphones wouldn't stay in my ears. After some investigation I discovered that having small ear canals meant that I should upgrade to a pair that would give me the ability to get custom ear plugs.

At the time, it seemed like the best product on the market was the Shure E3 headphones. So, here I am a year later and, for the third time the earphones have failed.

Shure's customer service process has been fine. I've sent the product back to them twice. Each time, they have been responsive, replacing the product.

Now, as the headphones don't work again, and I'm about ready to send them back, I've realized that no matter how good Shure's processes are in working with me, their customer, if theproduct sucks, you're going to have an unhappy customer unwilling to buy anything from your brand because of the one bad experience.

All I can think about today is how much time and money I've spent sending the headphones back twice already. Now, I don't want to be a Shure customer anymore. I just want my money back!

As a last ditch effort, I put a call into Patrick Kilroy, Shure's VP of Global Marketing and left a message. I'll let you know what he says.

Marketing starts with the design of a product. If it doesn't work it doesn't matter how good your other marketing and customer service efforts are.

Just ask the car companies in Detroit. 

Ghost Brands

Stuart Elliott threw out a term that I hadn't heard in awhile today in his Advertising column in the New York Times: "Ghost Brand"

Here's how Elliott defines it:

Bromo Seltzer is among scores of consumer products known as ghost brands or orphan brands because they were once formidable powerhouses in their categories but are now forlorn. The brands were forgotten or neglected by their owners, typically giant companies that market dozens of products, then used as cash cows to raise revenue for developing newer, often more advanced brands.

Do you have any ghost brands in your portfolio?

Go Johnny, Go!

Johnny Cupcakes, who I wrote about last month, pulls off a nice article in the Wall Street Journal Monday. Small, interesting brands can get a lot of attention these days with the power of social media fueling ideas for traditional media.

On another note: while researching this post I found this blog. What a wild world!

Greenwashing

While some have accused Wal-Mart of "greenwashing" in their latest efforts to make the business more sustainable, I believe that anything the company does to embrace more sustainable practices is a great thing for everyone.

Wal-Mart's CEO, Lee Scott told USA Today:

"We asked ourselves: If we had known 10 years ago what challenges we would face today, what would we have done different? What struck us was: This world is much more fragile than any of us would have thought years ago."

Wal-Mart plans to:

• Slash gasoline use by its trucking fleet, one of the largest in the USA, and use more hybrid trucks to increase efficiency by 25% over the next three years and double it within 10 years. That will save $310 million a year by 2015, the company says.

• Buy 100% of its wild-caught salmon and frozen fish for the North American market only from fisheries that are certified as "sustainable" by the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council within three to five years. That designation means areas of the ocean aren't fished in ways that destroy fish populations.

• Cut energy use at its more than 7,000 stores worldwide by 30% and cut greenhouse-gas emissions at existing stores by 20% in seven years. Wal-Mart is the largest private electricity user in the USA.

• Reduce solid waste from U.S. stores by 25% within three years.

I'll take that kind of greenwashing any day of the week.

Nike Blockhead

French soccer star, Zinédine Zidane’s, head butt of Italian defender, Marco Materazzi, in the waning minutes of the World Cup final in July was the shot that was heard around the world bringing sorry and embarrassment to France. Now, Nike is having some fun with the cultural incident.

A new Nike poster shows Materazzi in the shape of an armoire, branded “Armadi Materazzi.” The posters copy reads: “Solidità mondiale testata a prova di testate” (“World-class solidity, proven to be head-butt-proof”).

Carlo Cavallone, a copywriter at Wieden & Kennedy in Amsterdam, told the New York Times that the ads were intended to “rub it in a bit, but without being chauvinistic.”

The ability to tweak cultural events and have fun with them is a sign of a strong brand.

Kudos to Nike soccer!

Helga in the House

Check out Helga on MySpace. She's the spokeswoman for Volkswagen on MySpace. With over 9000 friends and fun videos pimping Pimp My Ride, CP+B has created a fun and effective campaign that looks like it's playing well on MySpace.

While the campaign has been criticized, it's one thing to sit on the sidelines and try to develop the perfect social media strategy,which will never happen, and it's quite another jump into the medium and start having fun and learning.

It sure looks like VW is doing that.

Second Life Fashion in WSJ

If you want to catch up with what's happening in the fashion world on Second Life, check out Andrew LaVallee's Style &Substance column from today's Wall Street Journal.

It seems there is a booming fashion business in the virtual world:

Because Second Life creators own their products and can sell them, the game has attracted both professional and amateur designers, says Linden spokeswoman Catherine Smith. That has led to a thriving fashion scene that includes not just dressmaking but also jewelry, hair and even skin design, as people purchase the elements to create a look for their online alter egos. Selling virtual clothes to real people for their avatars can even be lucrative: In August, the 20 best-selling Second Life fashion designers generated a combined $140,466 in sales, Linden says.

"We found out pretty quickly that people loved owning things," Ms. Smith says, and many start by buying items for their avatars. "It's not surprising that fashion and hairstyles and skins are as attractive and as exciting and as valuable as they are, because it's part of individualizing" the appearance of a player's online persona.

And, brands like American Apparel, are building businesses that are driving revenue:

Raz Schionning, American Apparel's director of Web services, admits to some initial ambivalence about the Second Life store, which opened June 21. Many of the clothes sold in Second Life are on the racy, "Matrix"-inspired side. "I wasn't sure if the concept of selling T-shirts to that audience was going to fly at all," he says. Since then, though, the store has sold some 4,000 items, catering to players who want their avatars to dress as they do.

Build a Community to Innovate

Francios, from Emergence Marketing wrote a fantastic post today entitled, Crowdsourcing vs. community outsourcing. He concluded:

In the end, successfully outsourcing product innovation and other processes to outside communities comes down to a deep understanding of two factors:

1. understanding of the traditional keys to success for that particular process
2. understanding of the fundamentals to successfully create (if needed), manage and interact with communities - virtual or otherwise

This post reminded me of the conversation I had with Jake Mckee, which became the basis of a chapter in Spark entitled, Build a Community. Here are some more tools to think about when looking at crowdsourcing or community building to help innovate:

1. Let Everybody Go Home Happy – I love Jake’s motto! It’s all about getting everyone involved in the community, from customers to suppliers, but ensuring that everyone is excited to be involved and their needs are being met.

2. Be a Guide – Jake’s distinction of letting go of the management paradigm is an important one. As we all learned in navigating the waters of dating in high school, you can participate in and perhaps guide a relationship, but you certainly can’t control it. Instead of managing the relationship with customers, think about being their voice inside the walls of your company. Allow for members of the community, both inside and outside the company, to take self-guided explorations.

3. Facilitate a Community – While lots of companies think about and even say they have formed a community around their products, many times this “community” resides in boxes of warranty cards that have been unopened for years. Think about ways you could form a community of customers and suppliers. Focus on personal relationships. Think about how you could support your community by sharing information and building space, both online and off, to facilitate gathering.

4. Form an Advance Warning System – Once you have steps in place to form a community around your company, think about it in terms of a strategic advance warning system. How can you use the community, whether it’s 10 people or 10,000 people, to give you a strategic competitive advantage?

5. Define the Relationship Between Company and Community – For many companies, like Lego, it is impossible to start the journey of building a community in the confines of the current company structure. Try taking a small group of people, and allowing that small team to engage and start to build a community with customers without the usual corporate pressures. Only after the community gains some momentum should you reintegrate it back into the company itself and make it a part of the organization. Remember that community is about establishing long-term relationships, not just creating a new marketing campaign.

6. Keep Your Customers Engaged – The one thing I’ve learned from writing a blog is that it’s relatively easy to get people excited and engaged initially, but it’s another thing to keep them engaged over the long haul. Once you start the process of community building you have to be committed to creating new reasons to stay engaged. Run contests, connect customers to other customers, and create fresh content.

7. Experience the Good, Bad and Ugly – I like Jake’s analogy that engaging in a community is a lot like dating. At first, people are giddy to be involved. After a while, the humanness of relationships begins to emerge, including insecurities and disappointment. That’s all part of the game. To gain the most from a community, you’ve got to be committed in good times and in bad.

1. Let Everybody Go Home Happy – I love Jake’s motto! It’s all about getting everyone involved in the community, from customers to suppliers, but ensuring that everyone is excited to be involved and their needs are being met.

2. Be a Guide – Jake’s distinction of letting go of the management paradigm is an important one. As we all learned in navigating the waters of dating in high school, you can participate in and perhaps guide a relationship, but you certainly can’t control it. Instead of managing the relationship with customers, think about being their voice inside the walls of your company. Allow for members of the community, both inside and outside the company, to take self-guided explorations.

3. Facilitate a Community – While lots of companies think about and even say they have formed a community around their products, many times this “community” resides in boxes of warranty cards that have been unopened for years. Think about ways you could form a community of customers and suppliers. Focus on personal relationships. Think about how you could support your community by sharing information and building space, both online and off, to facilitate gathering.

4. Form an Advance Warning System – Once you have steps in place to form a community around your company, think about it in terms of a strategic advance warning system. How can you use the community, whether it’s 10 people or 10,000 people, to give you a strategic competitive advantage?

5. Define the Relationship Between Company and Community – For many companies, like Lego, it is impossible to start the journey of building a community in the confines of the current company structure. Try taking a small group of people, and allowing that small team to engage and start to build a community with customers without the usual corporate pressures. Only after the community gains some momentum should you reintegrate it back into the company itself and make it a part of the organization. Remember that community is about establishing long-term relationships, not just creating a new marketing campaign.

6. Keep Your Customers Engaged – The one thing I’ve learned from writing a blog is that it’s relatively easy to get people excited and engaged initially, but it’s another thing to keep them engaged over the long haul. Once you start the process of community building you have to be committed to creating new reasons to stay engaged. Run contests, connect customers to other customers, and create fresh content.

7. Experience the Good, Bad and Ugly – I like Jake’s analogy that engaging in a community is a lot like dating. At first, people are giddy to be involved. After a while, the humanness of relationships begins to emerge, including insecurities and disappointment. That’s all part of the game. To gain the most from a community, you’ve got to be committed in good times and in bad.