I’ve always told my clients that the biggest key marketing success is having stellar customer service. You can’t sell it and if you promote it, you better be prepared to back it up. Customer service isn’t flashy, but it’s practically free and it’s got teeth that means return customers.

Enter Naomi (my muse as of late) with her post on Post-Sale Functions, or as she refers to it, the red-headed stepchild of marketing. In a few sentences, she pulls back the shiny veneer of most marketing techniques stating that if you aren’t making efforts to hold onto your customers, you just might be stupid.

Naomi’s post reminded me of one of my own personal customer service experiences. My wife and I occasionally go to a contemporary Italian restaurant called Bono’s on the popular 2nd Street drag of Belmont Shores. The food at Bono’s is always excellent and we always come away satisfied, but it’s a bit pricey for our modest budget. If the food was the only thing good about the restaurant, I probably wouldn’t go very often. What keeps us coming back is the customer service.

The restaurant can probably seat about 100 or so people with one medium sized dining area and small patio. I counted at least 12 employees on the floor, not counting the manager, bartender or hostess. That’s 1 person for every 2 tables. The place was busy and the staff were highly active, but never stressed. Everyone helped everybody else. One guy got our drink order, another brought water, someone brought bread and finally a water took our food order. We had someone at our table about every 5 minutes to drinks, clean up bread crumbs before the meal, take empty dishes, bring a desert menu and essentially make sure we never wanted for anything at any given moment.

As busy as it may seem, the service never seemed intrusive. I could maintain a conversation with my wife and hardly notice the buzz of staff around us. Most of the time, I never leave a restaurant feeling anything more than full. Leaving Bono’s, we were satiated and a smile on my face. That is why we will always come back despite the high prices. But how could Bono’s do better?

They should start with a better website. The lame flash intro (which I’ve linked passed for you) is arbitrary and takes too long to get to the information. My thought is that if you have to put a Skip Intro on your site, maybe you should have skipped the intro to begin with. Once inside, the site is minimalist to a fault. There’s hardly anything on the site that gives you a feeling of the restaurant. There’s no presence or attitude.

If they’re proud of their restaurant, and want to embrace customer reviews, they should add a link to sites like Yelp and encourage people to make comments about the experience. I know I would.

How about a mailing list. I would love to hear about special events or menu changes, or maybe an invite on my birthday or other cheesy way to get me back into the restaurant. They should swap out the typical email link to a web form asking for that information.

Just because you got the butts in the seats doesn’t mean you’re finished marketing. The way you deal with customers then and after is essential and will ultimately make your pre-sale efforts a lot easier and cheaper in the long run.

I read a fascinating piece on Madison Avenue Journal today by Paul McEnany. Paul is a marketing strategist for Levenson and Hill in Dallas and also has his own blog, Hee-Haw Marketing. The piece he wrote for MAJ, entitled Consumer Generated Reviews and the ROI of Impact, makes the assertion that brand trust is harder to come by than in the past mostly due to the ease of individuals being able to reach out quickly and easily to obtain information about products and services or spread information themselves.

A new Deloitte study revealed what most of us probably already knew, consumer generated online reviews received insanely high trust scores. 99% of internet users find them either very or somewhat credible. Which begs the question, where the hell do we fit in? Strategy doesn’t mean much when the product has a fatal flaw, and no matter how deftly we build up a media buy, it falls flat if the product happens to, let’s say, poison children. But it’s even scarier in the un-extreme cases where brands mean less because they signify less. Lower priced items still have to beat the quality barrier to have a shot of making it past the reviews, so it starts to become much like the pharmaceutical problem of two identical products with different labels.

Between Useful and Inept
McEnany goes on to say that the future of agencies will see them be divided into to factions, some that, “focus on the need to capture imagination, to gain attention, to give permission for companies to be talked about”, and others who, “satisfy the need for business strategy, a direct response, ROI driven model that is all about immediate needs of the marketplace…”

In complete honesty, not being as deep involved in the industry as McEnany, I’m a little unsure of his references, but my crude assumption is that he means it’s Flash vs. Bang, Form vs. Function.

The difference in strategy with experience is that we’re not just creating ads for the sake of informing the publics, but we’re leading the loudest 10% into deeper relationships, while giving them permission to discuss these with the other 90%. This is what makes integration so vital. You don’t walk away from awareness and reach for a deep connection with a few, just like you don’t walk away from the few for the many. It’s the advertising equivalent of the balance of faithfulness and promiscuity.

It’s no longer just about just pushing out campaigns that inform or create buzz. Once the buzz has started and people go looking for more information, agencies and their clients need to be prepared with a plan of action to keep their interest, help them for opinions and provide useful and easily transferable information so they can run off and tell their circle of influence.

My wife and receive a few subscriptions to various interior design magazines, most recently Elle Decor. I read it partially by a sick need to torture myself with products I could never afford and for generating ideas I can use around our home. I also look for items to talk about over at ColorThemes.com, my mothers interior design blog. If I find something cool advertised within the pages that needs further investigation, I’m usually on the web immediately looking for more information. I don’t know how many times I’ve searched out sites looking for quality info only to be handed over to a pretty site with minimal amounts of quality information, if any at all. That company just lost out on an opportunity to not only help promote themselves, but to somehow control lead the conversation. Now I might still talk about them, but my comments will also be tagged with, “the website doesn’t really provide much info.”

All that aside, I believe McEnany’s main point is he believes agencies need to find ways to incorporate the Flash with the Bang. That since the rules of marketing are changing, balance between the two is essential so success.

While our strategies are becoming more involved, and expanded to include more methods, it’ll be even more important to have steady hands to guide the process, understanding not only what makes people tick, but what makes business tick and finding happy balances that bring both these goals into alignment. That’s the kind of integration we need in order to stay relevant.

I think McEnany makes a really great point and has keen insight into the subject. My argument is that most on Madison Avenue aren’t listening to this Jerry Maguire-esque manifesto. But what do I know? You read the article and judge for yourself. Then go tell someone about it.

Paul – if you’re listening in and feel I’m missed the mark, please feel free to join the conversation and set me straight.

We don’t get much personal mail these days, not that we’re unpopular (which may be true I guess), but most of our interaction with friends, family and associates is through email, instant message or cell phones. We opt to not receive hard copies of our bills when we can and pay them online. If we get any mail, its either a magazine or some form of junk mail. Today was no exception.

I reached into the box and pulled out a single, lonely postcard. I figured it was from some mortgage company or real estate license because that’s about 80% of the junk we get. Not this time, though. This card was extra special, an offer for sand bag delivery. Yes, sandbags, like, “The levy is gonna burst. We need more sandbags!” I should also note that they do silt fence, straw wattles and visqueen, whatever the f**k those are.

Even though I live in a beach city, most of the homes sit on a large bluff far from the reaches of a potential squall or tsunami. There’s also a huge breakwater about 1,000 yards offshore specifically for that reason.

Most know that Southern California isn’t known for a heavy rain season. The threat of 6 inches of rain in a single day are pretty much non existent. Of course it’s always possible, but highly unlikely. So unlikely that there really isn’t much need to keep note of sandbag companies even if a huge storm is bearing down on us. Preparedness for this type of event isn’t a Californian strong suit. Now earthquakes are a different story. We brace the hell out of everything because we don’t want our precious china cabinet crashing down on our heads during dinner, but I digress.

I’m not exactly sure who sold the Saddleback Materials Company on the idea of a direct mail postcard to the residents of Long Beach, but I’m guessing that they’re sitting over the phone waiting for hundreds of phone calls to come in after this fantastic promotion; dozens at least.

I can’t figure out for the life of me why Saddleback would think they could find new customers by using direct mail to an obvious miscalculated demographic. Sandbags are obvious an old school market. They do business face to face and rely on relationships with contractors to increase business. Even if I was a contractor, what is the likelihood that I’m going to call Saddleback? I probably already have a company that provides me sand when needed. Why would I change just because someone sent me a postcard.

This postcard doesn’t represent the company. Even though it says they have fast friendly service at the right price, why am I to believe them? Because they have a photo showing mountains of prefab sandbags and a nice shiny truck for deliveries? Even if this postcard went to every contractor in the SoCal area, I doubt they’ll gain much from it.

I’m guessing grass roots selling is the best way to gaining business, direct contact with their intended clients. They could also stretch the boundaries a little. Instead of printing postcards, how about a message on the sandbags that says, “This home saved by Saddleback.” I’m tossing out a crazy one here, but how about inviting all your clients and their families out to the property for a treasure hunt amongst the sand mountains?

I guess I just don’t understand how companies go immediately to the default methods of promotion. I know that 90% of business have not read Seth Godin, but when you have a marketing budget, why isn’t the return ever considered? If I called Saddleback and asked them how they are managing their leads from this promotion, I’m almost sure they wouldn’t have any kind of analytics in place. I’m making a huge assumption, but call it an educated guess that Saddleback is not measuring their ROI in the slightest. They’re sending out random postcards to people they’ve never talked to and praying that a few call. It very well may happen, but I’m pretty sure they could spend that money elsewhere that has a much larger impact on their customers as well as their revenue.