Monday May 21, 2012
Free is the price point for sales success, according to a survey conducted by computer technical support company iYogi. While it is feared that freebies are consumed by people who want something for nothing and will never be converted into paying customers, these survey results support the try-before-you-buy model as a viable and effective marketing strategy. According to the survey of 2,000 people, after trying new products and services they had received for free, 42% said they made a purchase for additional products and services. That is definitely not a shabby conversion rate.
Perhaps marketing managers in major U.S. retail chains saw the results of this freebie research because for some reason there are plenty of retail chains that are eager to give free things away to customers and potential future customers this week. Here's a list of current freebie promotions from the U.S. retail industry, most of which begin and end this week.
Chili's Three-Day Freebies on Monday, May 21 - Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Chili's (EAT) is giving away a Free Appetizer with the purchase of an adult entree. You'll need the official coupon to get the freebie, and if you didn't receive a coupon in your e-mail, then you are probably not a member of the Chili's Email Club. Click here to get the appetizer freebie coupon and then join the Chili's Email Club, for another free Chips & Queso coupon.
7-Eleven One-Day Freebies on Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Oh, thank heaven it's Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven (SVDNF) convenience stores on Wednesday, May 23. Just walk into one of 6,790 U.S. 7-Eleven locations on Wednesday and get your free (small) Slurpee between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. (of course). Usually on national Free Slurpee Day the cups run out before the Slurpee mix or the customers, so earlier is better, if you can stand the Slurpee happy crowds.
Amazon and IKEA One-Day Freebies on Thursday, May 24, 2012
You can get a free $2 Amazon (AMZN) MP3 credit by sharing the name of your favorite song with all of your friends on your Facebook (FB) page. Click here to go to the official Amazon MP3 freebie page, and start your Facebook update from there. The $2 Amazon MP3 credit must be claimed by 11:59 PM PST on May 24, 2012.
IKEA will be giving away free IKEA Blue Bags on May 24th in local "high traffic areas" across the country, but not in IKEA stores. To find out the locations of the IKEA bag giveaway, customers are being directed to follow their local IKEA stores on Twitter where giveaway details will be announced. Check out the complete list of the local IKEA store Twitter accounts to find a bag giveaway location near you.
Two-Day IKEA Food Freebies May 26 - May 28, 2012
Build up your strength and energy reserves for an IKEA shopping experience by eating at the IKEA restaurant before you shop. Then if you spend $100 or more , the price of your meal will be deducted from your total shopping purchase. If you're a big eater, this could end up being a eat-one-get-furniture free promotion. The only qualification for the promotion is that you have to eat first and shop later, and do it all on the same day in the same store.
Chili's and Flying J Freebies Through the End of May, 2012
Another way to score a free appetizer from Chili's before the end of the month is to visit the Chili's bar with two or more friends with your freebie coupon. No purchase is necessary for this freebie. You just need to click here for the coupon, drag a couple of people onto Chili's bar stools, and, of course, be willing to share your free appetizer with your freebie loving friends.
Get a free hot beverage at Flying J convenience stores when you "like" them on Facebook. You'll need to have a Facebook account yourself, of course, and be logged into it. Then when you click here and "like" the Flying J Facebook page, the coupon that you'll need to print in order to obtain your beverage freebie will magically appear.
More Freebies from the U.S. Retail Industry:
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Sunday May 20, 2012
When the Spring 2012 Best Internet Shopping Websites for Customer Satisfaction list was released recently by the Foresee marketing research group, there were no big surprises and few changes compared to previous Best Internet Customer Satisfaction surveys. The customer satisfaction greats - Amazon, QVC, Apple, Avon, LLBean - are still great. The Internet customer satisfaction not-as-greats - Ancestry.com Abercrombie & Fitch, Safeway, PCMall and PCConnection are still not-as-great.
The fact that Amazon.com ranked highest for customer satisfaction is not a notable finding to the 152 million people with an active Amazon customer account. What is notable is the fact that Amazon's Foresee customer satisfaction score is the highest score awarded to any Internet shopping website since the Foresee research began in 2005. It's clear that high customer satisfaction will never be high enough for Amazon.
How is it that Amazon manages to continue to best its own bests when it comes to customer satisfaction? The Amazon customer satisfaction strategy starts with its customer-centric mission statement, includes a willingness to be criticized, and continues every day with consistent and constant attention to continuous customer improvements.
In a 2011 interview with Wired Magazine, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos described his view of the "perfect customer experience" and how he and his team work to create it every day.
"Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn't want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I've been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact. What went wrong? Why did that person have to call? Why aren't they spending that time talking to their family instead of talking to us? How do we fix it?"
Very simply, Amazon continues to best its own best customer experience by making it a priority, and paying attention to it every single day without fail.
Recently I had the opportunity to observe the opposite of this Amazon approach in a quick-serve restaurant chain. In the dining room there was a khaki-wearing man who was walking around the dining room snapping photos, taking notes, and obviously a member of the management team. Khaki-manager's important managerializing was interrupted by an elderly customer who had also spotted him in the lunchtime crowd.
The customer started a conversation by asking if it was okay to give the manager some feedback. The manager's reticent "Sure" was less than inviting, but the customer didn't seem to notice (or care).
The customer then started to make a very detailed and compelling case for expanding the size of two of the chain's restaurant locations (not the one we were sitting in). Almost immediately the manager's face showed his disinterest in a matter over which he had absolutely no control. Again the customer didn't seem to notice (or care about) the manager's less than enthusiastic attitude.
In the middle of the customer's feedback filibuster, the manager started clicking around on his phone, perhaps trying to give the customer a hint. But since the customer wasn't really tuned into visual cues, he just kept talking. Finally when the customer took a breath, the manager said, "You need to tell this to the manager at that location."
More customer talking, more phone clicking, and then a repeat of the directive. Rinse and repeat. Finally the manager strongly suggested in a somewhat impatient tone that the customer could either tell the manager at the location or find a phone number on the website and call headquarters.
Perhaps this fourth time the customer did notice the manager's lack of engagement with the discussion because the customer apologized for interrupting and said, "I just thought you might want to know what customers think about your places" before he walked out of the restaurant. After the customer left the manager rolled his eyes, shook his head, and continued on with the work he considered to be important, after successfully ridding himself of the customer feedback that he had deemed to be unimportant.
This is the anti-Amazon approach to customer feedback, and sadly the more common approach in the retail industry. Millions of times a day customers give relevant and irrelevant feedback to employees who have no incentive to care about it, no authority to do anything about it, and no system to communicate with those who are responsible for it. This is an organizational customer experience failure.
But the individual customer experience failure occurred when the well-meaning customer walked away without hearing the two most important words in the land of customer feedback... "Thank you." Thank you for your feedback. Thank you for taking the time to tell us about this. Thank you for visiting so many of our restaurant locations. Thank you for a great idea.
There were a lot of missed opportunities to make a loyal customer feel appreciated. Instead a customer was made to feel unimportant, and several other customers got the opportunity to observe it. The fact that khaki-manager didn't know (or care) that he was creating one of the worst kinds of customer experiences was a failure of priorities. The companies with the best customer experiences understand this and that's why they're always the ones at the top of the lists.
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Sunday May 20, 2012
When Wal-Mart (WMT) beat expectations in its Q1 earnings report this week, in one very quick stroke the stock price decline that occurred on news of its alleged bribery scandal in Mexico was erased. So, with that, it seems that investors have sent the message to Wal-Mart leaders that illegal practices and corruption are okay as long as the company continues to be profitable. That's probably the same kind of thinking that Wal-Mart and/or its subsidiaries used to justify the bribery in the first place, if, in fact, it is found that they actually did it.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to restore the integrity of American businesses after it was determined that questionable "payment" practices to foreign government officials was rather common. When the FCPA was fashioned, the U.S. government was taking the stance that profitability-at-any-cost would not be the strategy that American companies would carry with them as they set up operations in global markets around the world.
It's a sad statement about American corporate leadership when values have to be thrust upon them via government legislation. it's also a sad statement that 35 years after the FCPA was enacted, the investment community has proven that it doesn't agree that global integrity matters all that much. That is, it doesn't matter until some potentially hefty monetary government penalty levied against Wal-Mart substantially hurts its profitability. That's when investors will bail again. But it will be money, not integrity, that motivates a Wal-Mart stock bailout for most.
The Wal-Mart bribery scandal is shining a spotlight on how easily retail industry leaders can lose their integrity when they use the stock market as their due North. If executive pay is tied to stock performance, and investors have no values beyond money, then executives are incentivized to adopt the profitability-at-any-cost approach that the FCPA is still trying to prevent.
This week Forbes reported that bribery scandals typically cost the offending company between one and two percent of sales. For Wal-Mart, that would be more than $4 billion dollars. That's more than the total of all penalties levied in the 50 bribery cases that have been resolved in the past four years combined.
So who would end up "paying" for Wal-Mart's illegal actions, if it is found that they were any? We can probably guess who would be squeezed in order to cover the losses, and it's probably not anybody in the executive ranks of the Wal-Mart corporation.
It would be most fair if penalties were paid from the personal assets of the people who were involved in the alleged bribery and those who allegedly chose to cover it up. But nobody said life or the business practices of the second largest company in the U.S. are fair. Allegedly.
When Wal-Mart lost it's #1 ranking on the 2012 Fortune 500 list, it was a message to Wal-Mart that price is not the only criteria consumers use when choosing where to shop. So while Wal-Mart has plenty to be nervous about in the ongoing corruption investigation and possible subsequent enforcement actions from authorities, Wal-Mart should also be nervous that the offensiveness of its offenses are going to reach a tipping point with consumers who just won't want to do business with them any more.
The cost of profitability-at-any-cost might prove to be too high in this case, and in the long-run that might be the best thing that could happen to the Wal-Mart organization that Sam Walton would probably not be completely proud of today.
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Saturday May 19, 2012
To budding Internet entrepreneurs, May 18, 2012 was an historic milestone, when a 28 year-old programmer who started a website in his college dorm room launched the largest NASDAQ IPO in Internet history and became the leader of a hundred billion-dollar operation. For investors, May 18, 2012 was the Friday when Facebook (FB) fell flat, and the trading day when another super hyped IPO barely lived up to its expectations.
One of my friends called me last week to tell me that she had the opportunity to invest in the Facebook IPO and asked me what I thought about it. My immediate response was that the greatest concern about being invested in Facebook would be that you are invested in its leader. And to me that is a risky investment.
It's not that I have any empirical evidence that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad leader or a bad person. It's just that I don't have any empirical evidence that he's a good leader or a good person. If I believed what I saw in The Social Network movie, my concerns would quickly become serious concerns. My common sense tells me that The Social Network was a screenplay, not a documentary, but in the absence of much concrete evidence to the contrary, it's easy to wonder how much of what we saw on the theater screen was true.
For a man who founded a company that has taken transparency to a frightening level, we don't see Zuckerberg fully embracing his own transparency paradigm. In the 8 years that the social media network he created has existed, he's posted less than 100 photos on Facebook. He updates his own personal Facebook profile page about once a month. His latest updated posted on May 18, 2012 was "Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. -- with Chris Cox and 4 others." The fact that he had nothing to say about what he thought or felt about the historic event to his 13 million subscribers leads me to wonder if he buys into the power or understands the potential of his own social media creation.
Just below Zuckerberg's NASDAQ update is a two sentence blurb about Facebook, including the Facebook mission statement. The last part of the last sentence of that blurb says that people use Facebook " to share and express what matters to them." That's exactly what I want to know about Mark Zuckerberg, and that's exactly what he hasn't revealed about himself to the world. It's not that the founder and CEO of the world's most active social media network is expected to tell us what he's having for lunch every day, but it is expected that he would want to share in a much more personal way than he has.
Compare Mark Zuckerberg's use of social media to someone like Zappos (AMZN) founder and CEO, Tony Hsieh, whose social media tool of choice is Twitter. Admittedly Tony's Twitter activity has dropped off dramatically in 2012, but prior to that he was the corporate king of Twitter. When Hsieh tweets quotes, photos, magazine articles, riddles, jokes, and helpful advice about not leaving canned soda in the car in the summer heat, he is "sharing and expressing what matters to him." If his tweeting is sincere (and Hsieh's reputation is built on a foundation of sincerity), then we know much about the heart, character, and intentions of the man who is leading the Zappos team. That is something I personally wouldn't hesitate to invest in.
While it is no small accomplishment to launch the biggest IPO in Internet history, now that his company is public, it's time for Mark Zuckerberg to become public too. Before the investment community is going to feel completely comfortable with investing in a company that has a long way to go to live up to its $104 billion valuation, it's going to need to feel completely comfortable with the person who's leading the company towards fulfilling its potential. It's time for Mark Zuckerberg to take some of that transparency that he's involuntarily created for 901 million Facebook users, and voluntarily participate in it himself.
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