The Harry Potter Phenomenon
When I was a kid, I collected sea shells. When I got bored of that I collected coins. Then, for some bizarre reason, I started collecting rose petals and storing them between the pages of very heavy books. Do you know what happens to a rose petal left inside the pages of The Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide, between page 846 and 847 for six years? It becomes soft, and almost translucent. Natural frail skin with dark, thin veins, like a small section of an anatomical map in my biology class...keep reading.
An Idea for Agency Staffing
Sunday, July 17, 2005
I was speaking to Dick Thomas, the former CEO of Frankel, at a cocktail party this weekend about the agency model in general, and he said something so obvious, its genius.
Dick suggested that a staffing strategy for superior talent could possibly come from an ilk of lost stars—women and men (primarily women) who had given up their promising careers to become stay-at-home moms. He suggested that the creation of an agency environment that uses these mothers in a part-time fashion while giving them benefits that would truly help them at home and make their lives easier would create a staff of highly motivated, talented, and eager-to-be-stimulated people.
That’s absolutely brilliant.
According to the US Census, there are over 13 million women who are stay-at-home moms in the country. Even if we assume that only 0.25% of them were in marketing, and that 20% of that 0.25% were exceptionally good at what they did, it still gives us 6,500 amazing candidates to choose from. And I’d prefer a pool of 6,500 exceptional, motivated, experienced and interested candidates for part-time work than 100,000 unknown resumes any day.
Coupling: The Business of Social Circles
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
My wife and I have recently been talking about the best way to establish a social circle here in Chicago. Most of my friends are in San Francisco, while most of hers are in New York. I haven’t really found a set of people from work to hang out with socially yet, and besides that, we’ve decided that we’d like to become part of a group of young, professional Indian couples in the city that get together a few times a month.
Interestingly, Chicago though a big city, is less transitory than San Francisco and New York. People here seem to have these established cliques that are hard to penetrate.
In our first couple of weeks, we took to smiling at other Indian couples at random places in the city. We’d assess a couple based on how they were dressed and what they seemed to be like, and try and catch their eye; the idea was that if there seemed to have a similar interest, we’d approach them and ask them out. We were looking for couples to date.
This, of course, led to a few interesting situations.
Like this very hip and trendy couple we saw at Room & Board, also presumably looking for furniture. We followed them around a bit at first, trying to catch parts of their conversation to assess how much of an accent they had, and place them on the FOB-ABCD continuum. When they seemed worthy of an approach, we debated on the best tactic to use. Would a line work best, or a straightforward “Hey, how are ya?” But try as we might, we couldn’t maintain eye contact with them. We literally followed them around the store for ten minutes, but they had no interest in us. We might have even made them uncomfortable because I could have sworn they started walking faster through the building.
Basically, we’re trying to date all over again.
Finally, we decided to place an ad on the Internet. Our initial thought was to use Craigslist, but in my experience, the community sections aren’t really read by a lot of couples looking for other couples to hang out with. So, we decided on placing the ad on a message board primarily read by Indians in Chicago. We got a couple of responses, and just this weekend, had out first couples date. It went well, we thought, and the four of us had a great time. But two responses doesn’t give us much of a choice, and is poor marketing.
Which, of course, got me thinking.
The online dating business is a very successful business model both in the US and internationally. There are sites that cater to just about every romantic, demographic, ethnographic and Freudian need on the planet. You have your traditional meet and greet through sites like match.com and true.com. You have sites geared towards intellectuals, and sites for people with alternative lifestyles. There are even sites for specific ethnicities.
And yet, there’s not a single resource that focuses on matching couples with couples (in a social and platonic sense, anyway.) I’d pay for a resource like that.
So, enterprising people, here’s your business plan summary:
- Create a brand and property that focuses on taking information from couples, and matches them with other couples with similar interests and needs.
- Instead of profiles, there’d be cofiles.
- Browsing through cofiles could be done by interests, geography, ethnicity, and age range.
- The property could host their couples’ version of Dinner at 8, where couples are brought together in groups of four for dinner in specific cities.
- Provide “moving specials” as incentives for new couples to sign up.
- Call the business Coupling. I’m sure Victaulic would sell you coupling.com. They don’t really use it.
In the meanwhile, we continue to search for our social circle. We know you’re out there. We’ll find you.
Postscript on 7/21: My wife came up with a brilliant alternative to a new business: for match.com to offer a service that continues their exisiting relationship with successfully matched couples: she calls it aftermatch.com.
Culture Points: A New Parameter in Customer Intimacy
Two months ago, I was a 30-something educated Indian male living in Lincoln Park, working in marketing, with subscriptions to Esquire and Cargo, on the Giorgio Armani mailing list, who received the Hold Everything and Red Envelope catalogs.
Two months later, the majority of my demographics remain the same, as do my subscriptions and other attitudinal measures.
However, I’ll be damned if you could now sell me 10% of the things I would have used my disposable income for without a second thought, back in April.
Know what changed? I got married.
As marketers, we’re not unfamiliar with the concept of using life events to trigger marketing campaigns or offers. We have successfully used graduations, weddings and births as surfboards for new products and services. But in the context of true relationship marketing, I don’t think we have really considered how much really changes in an individual’s life around these life stages. We don’t use them as ongoing platforms—instead, we typically use them as peaks for our own messaging. In fact, if your relationship marketing engine monitors these life stages and makes attitudinal adjustments in the calculation of LTV and other CRM measures, I want to know about it—it would be the first time I’ve encountered such a practice.
So how have things really changed? Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Two months ago, these are the things I would have done that I absolutely would not (or am not allowed to) do now:
- Buy a $2,000 Giorgio Armani Black label suit.
- Take a weekend gambling trip to Vegas with the boys at a moment’s notice.
- Spend $180 on a Steven Alan cotton shirt to wear around the house, thinking it was cool just because Apartment Number 9 sells it.
- Decide on what condiment must be best in the grocery aisle based on how expensive it is.
- Buy new underwear because I hadn’t done enough laundry.
- Eat out just about every night.
- Add randomly to my TV show DVD collection by buying large quantities at a time, and sometimes ending up with doubles.
- Buy the “locker and laundry” option at my gym so that my clothes were fresh every time I went back.
Now, here’s the important bit: These changes I’ve listed aren’t happening just because I’m now married. True, my demographics have altered because there’s a check-box against the “married” question now. And its also true that marital status is an important demographic differentiator. But the real reason these changes are happening because I’m married to a specific woman with specific values, specific demographics and attitudinal factors. The list above might be completely different were I married to someone else. Meaning, lifestage triggers and resulting CRM value calculations can’t be made on a single customer record just based on a change in his or her specific lifestage; every individual’s information within the relationship equation must be considered. In my case, my wife’s attitudes and psychographic information plays a huge role in my ongoing consumer habits. As, by the way, does my cultural background.
Hang on, you might say. Cultural background? That sounds a bit hokey.
See, being Indian, there are very specific values we ascribe to a marital relationship. Those dynamics would be completely different were we two busy New York attorneys who grew up in Manhattan and the Hamptons. As they would be different if we were high school sweethearts from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Our cultural idiosyncrasies surface most when we go through a life change that triggers a deep-seated value. Don’t believe me? Think about the Indian kids you see in your kids’ schools. Think about their parents. Think about how they behave, and what they seem to hold dear. Compare that to another culture, perhaps your own. Don’t you see a difference? Obviously, this is not a right or wrong, goor or bad comparison. But as marketers, we have to start considering what these changes actually signify, and how our customers’ lives will be different as a result of them.
For example, here’s what I would now do that I wouldn’t have even considered two months ago:
- Buy organizing furniture from Target.
- Buy vacation airline tickets two months in advance.
- Buy groceries for $1,000 every month.
- Look for a florist that was on my drive home from work.
- Buy things because they “smell nice.”
- Send birthday cards to everyone I know.
- Keep a watch on every major store sale, both online and offline.
So, this is my hypothesis: I believe that every consumer goes through what I’m going to call “Culture Points.” Culture Points are events in a consumer’s life that drastically change their buying attitudes and purchase propensities. Culture Point value calculations and measurements will require a new analytical methodology that merges multiple customers’ attitudinal and demographic data along with cultural parameters that are unique to the consumers involved. To start with, Culture Points could be integrated very easily into marketing data by proactive pop-up surveys on Web sites, or by simple survey questions at the end of a catalog purchase call. Eventually, I’d like to see Culture Points as standard marketing tools that are used to adjust personalized offers and more importantly, customer LTVs within a CRM environment.
Love-Hate Loyalty
My wife just sent me this snippet, and the story amused me very much. It’s an excellent example of loyalty techniques that define a brand.
By systematically antagonizing its customers, Lush Cosmetics manages to earn their undying loyalty, reports Lucas Conley in Fast Company (July 05). The potential for ticking off its customers happens because Lush dumps unusually large numbers of weaker-selling items from its line to make way for new entries. That can make customers mad because some of them may have really liked certain of the dropped items, even if most other people didn’t. But the disappointed customers end up loving Lush because the company then periodically sells limited quantities, or “personal batches” of some of the discontinued items online, which makes its customers feel extra-extra special: “There’s this exclusivity,” explains Simon Nicholls, who manages the Lush website, http://www.lush.com”. Only 300 people around the world will have these products.”
Lush’s love-hate marketing strategy is actually a function of its larger vision to stay on top of ever-changing consumer tastes by ruthlessly replacing fading items with fresh ones. In fact, about “one-third of Lush’s entire product line” is dropped each year in favor of more offbeat and tantalizing ...goods.” The strategy is possible mainly because Lush stays so close to its customers (a.k.a. “Lushies") who swarm the company’s forums by the thousands to chat online” with ceo Mark Constantine, who clearly relishes the give-and-take. “We are far more challenged by our customers than we are by our competitors,” he says. Lush has gone as far as flying in some of its forum members to help manufacture products, although sometimes products will “start merely as words suggested by customers ... and they inspire products to match.”
At the moment, some of the words in search of a product are “smitten,” “whoosh,” “aurora” and “flitter.” Mark also has one of his designers working on taking toothpaste in “unbelievably wonderful and frightfully weird” directions, like “green apple, salt and charcoal,” for instance. “We reserve the right to make mistakes ... I believe that’s a great privilege,” he says. A certain quirkiness does seem to suit him. Back in the late ‘80s, when Mark was product-designing for Body Shop, he proposed “Bath Bombs—fizzing, aromatic balls that disintegrate in water.” Body Shop rejected the idea, but today Lush “turns out as many as 60,000 Bath Bombs a day, and they’re 40 percent of sales.” Having started out with just “one store in 1995, Lush has 320 today (21 stores in the United States and growing), doing $100 million in annual sales in 35 countries, with plans to triple in size by 2008.”