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In this blog I intend to share my experience and knowledge in different subjects including marketing, business, strategic work, etc.
I hope to keep a very practical approach so it can be useful to others in their daily work.
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Besides my blog you will find my portfolio including my artwork and photos.
*All photos on the site are Suzana Profeta’s copyright unless something else is stated.*
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Some companies aim to improve their costumer service by using boiler plates. They believe that it would help them to a better customer service, by speeding up processes. And in theory they could be right. It is considered good customer service to give prompt responses to inquiries and complaints.
BUT…
We live in a time where individuals are used to be treated as individuals. You can adapt you search engine, you can adapt your smart phone, and many companies are adapting their services so their customers get tailored solutions to their needs.
So how can you speed up processes and STILL give a “tailored” answer to the customer? It’s not rocket science:
- Remember ALWAYS that the costs of acquiring a new customer is 6-7 times higher than retaining (and taking good care) existing ones
- Ensure customer service employees that are able to understand what the customer’s inquiry is all about (it is not as obvious as it sounds, many companies fail here…)
- Use boiler plates to speed up INTERNAL PROCESSES, but ADAPT them to each inquiry, so the customer feels that the answer is directed to them ( and not coming from a dumb machine)
You can read more about boiler plates here
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 guardian.co.uk The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull in April 2010 has shaken Europe, closing all airports in Northern Europe and causing huge financial losses in the travel industry. On diverse social media you could read of people stranded around the world – and the terrible service they got from their airlines, travel organizers, etc.: People that went off for work related travel and people forced to prolong or cancel their vacations.
But is Force Majeure really only a bad thing for business? You can either get in despair and start worrying about your losses or look for opportunities within the challenges your company is facing.
Putting aside all the terrible factors related to a Force Majeure situation, it is an excellent opportunity to brand yourself and to improve your competitive situation.
In Force Majeure those who are able to keep the head cold and solve their customers’ problems win.
It sounds simple, but it’s all about building lasting relationship and strengthening loyalty. If you are there for your customers in the bad times they will keep loyal to you in the good times as well. Not rocket science, however numerous corporations failed to service their customers.
If your company is able to help out when people need you the most, they will trust you their money as loyal customers too, they will develop the so desired “deeply felt affection” needed for a successful branding. They would not only turn into loyal customers, but they will tell everybody how well your company handled the situation – you suddenly have an army of loyal ambassadors promoting you for “free”.
In other words… in hard times keep your head cold and help out – Company karma, if you like. How you handle the bad times will come back tenfold – YOU decide if it comes back to bite you or if it comes back to improve your business… Your turn!
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I just read this very cool blog post on consumer behavior, the “Levy flight” describing loyal users/ consumers behavior.
In short, someone finds your site/ joint, starts using it, recommend to their friends, but after a while they feel there is no more value to be harvested at they go looking for somewhere else. It is valid both for virtual but also for analogue visits/use.
Important to be aware of. But how to avoid it?
Of course you can keep giving new features and improving, but is that enough?
Set cell phone companies. We are overwhelmed by messages regarding new features and improvements, but after a while it’s just boring. It’s expected. EVERY BODY does that. It takes to re-invent the cell phone concept to waken consumers again, just like iPhone did.
Is it possible to keep re-inventing your product/ service not to loose the interest of users? I agree with Seth in his blog that we need to add The Levy Flight parameter when thinking branding and communication strategies.
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 Viral Growth Copyright Seth Godin Using social media as a buzz generator has become the thing to do in marketing. You have the perfect smooth media for Experiential Marketing and in theory it is the ultimate viral marketing media. But how come companies are having a hard time making it work? What are the pitfalls?
The issue is that many companies have the mistaken idea that having a large number of followers would be enough to create a good viral buzz.
On the blog post “Viral Growth trumps lots of faux followers”, Seth Godin publishes the results of his studies in this area:
“If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)”
The main problem companies are facing when using social media for viral marketing is the quality of the campaigns. Marketers are becoming blinded by the huge amount of users and forget to develop marketing campaigns that follow the golden rules of Viral Marketing:
- Idea – it needs to appeal to a specific hive (which can eventually “sneeze” the virus to other hives). Remember, when you go viral, you stop selling products and you start selling ideas.
- Sneezers – who do you want to pass on the virus for you? You need to figure out who your powerful sneezers are and engage the most effective promiscuous sneezers.
- Message – The idea needs to be innovative and appealing, so the hive’s powerful sneezers feel that it is worth to spread it to the members of the hive – and to other hives. In other words you need to have interesting content.
- Smoothness – the way you present the message must be easy to pass on. For example YouTube videos are easy to share, “invite friends to join” button, etc.
Besides that you need to understand how the different social media is used in order to get the best of them. Facebook for instance is a “talking to a friend” tool, while Linkedin and Plaxo are more business oriented.
Developing your “company idea” and planning your campaign is not a thing from the past, the communication tools evolve but the basics are still the same: Which Unique Buying Proposition you are communication to whom and through which channel. Concentrate on quality messages to “fewer” quality sneezers than poor messages to a load of people that in the end won’t make a difference for your business.
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I’ve been writing about branding and I realize that it seems to me that there is a misconception of what branding really is amongst my readers. Most relate branding to “have a known name” while others think of logos and visual identity. Branding is however much more than that.
The objective of branding is not to be known. Branding is to be LOVED!
Almost everybody has heard of the Toyota Prius, but how many people would actually BUY one? (See my last blog post).
A successful branding is the most powerful marketing tool in existence. When you achieve it you have your customers doing marketing for you, selling your product/service! It sounds like a dream but this is the core of the so-called Viral Marketing.
The objective of branding has surpassed selling specific products or services, branding is selling “the idea of the company”. With a successful branding the relationship with customers evolves towards a “deeply felt affection”, which again results in:
- High customer loyalty – churn reduced to basically “null”
- Reduced marketing costs – customers get so excited about your company that they sell it to other customers
 In the most extreme branding cases we have Apple. Apple has become an iCult and their customers have a near-religious relation to the iBrand and its products – which spreads like rings in the water. Apple launches are expected with great excitement, it is followed on-line, and it is followed minute by minute on Twitter! See the last launch of the iPad. There is nothing really new about it. It is an iPhone the size of a laptop. But there are already large queues of excited people waiting to buy it, people with both iPhones and laptops. We don’t really need it but we must have it (myself included)!
At the other side we have Nokia. Great reliable products with outstanding technology, fantastic intuitive usability, probably the most selling mobile phones in the world. When you have tried a Nokia it is hard to get used to another mobile phone. Unless it is an iPhone…
Nokia even has its own Smartphone which is probably as good as or even better than the iPhone. So why on earth is there no hype around Nokia’s Smartphones while people are killing eachother over the next generation iPhone? Because Nokia users are not “in love” with the Nokia idea, and iPhone users are! Nokia is a well known and respected name and the undisputed market leader when it comes to mobile phones, but unless it accomplishes selling the “idea of Nokia”, getting users to fall in love with it, it will lose terrain to the iHype.
Nokia today has 40% of the cell phone market, but how will the future look? Will Nokia be able to keep their position when faced with new strong well branded and agile competitors entering their market? Will they be able to grow market share and increase sales without the “love effect”? Will they be able to create the product stickiness or will they see an increase in churn, in disloyalty?
Branding Love-effect maths:
I know nobody will actually do the maths, but for the sake of understanding how it works, here it goes
“Love Effect”= [experience with brand – original expectation]
In very simplified terms, a powerful branding is dependent of the company’s ability to sell their business idea and the quantity of people affected by the “Love Effect”.
Of course there are a number of factors that are essential for a viral idea to work and turn it into a successful branding. Seth Godin has written “Unleashing the Idea Virus” (2000) which is great literature to understand the mechanisms of viral marketing (even though the the book desperately deserves to be updated with Social Media Trends anno 2010).
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 We all heard about the benefits of being first movers, but what does this mean? Is it always good to be first mover?
Toyota Prius, for instance. Absolute first mover. It was created in 1997 and it aimed to save us from greenhouse effect. An “innovative” hybrid machine of gasoline and electricity, able to get more than 90 miles to the gallon. In theory it didn’t have a choice besides being a great success. Instead well… I really haven’t seen people rushing to Toyota to get theirs: A name nobody is sure how to spell, ugly as hell, and aimed “everybody” as target group.
Toyota has “sinned” in many fronts, and I guess people have written books about it. As I see it, the core of the problem is that Prius was a technology driven development, that didn’t take a specific target group/ hive into consideration. Some people could say: “They thought about environmentally minded people…” But did they? Did they understand what the target group likes, how they should appeal? What really matters? Did they understand how to make the hive “fall in love” with their car? This is a typical example of technology driven development…
Being the first mover is just not enough. You need to understand your target group needs, as they were your own needs, in order to be able to exploit the position.
The successful branding is a consequence of the ability of finding a “market void”, the unexploited market need and fulfill it IN A WAY THAT YOUR TARGET GROUP “FALL IN LOVE” WITH IT.
I guess Toyota didn’t make it easy for anybody to fall in love with Prius, not even their desired “target group” who ever they are…
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 Often sales mentality dictates that just about anything should be done to turn a prospect into a customer, including stretching the truth, promising more than what can be delivered. We’ve all heard “The customer is king, the customer is always right”. I would rather say “If the customer is king then honesty is god”
My postulate is that being able to say “no” and to be honest is an investment, not a bad thing nor a failure.
You may lose an immediate sale, but what you are doing is investing in your image, and branding yourself as a trustworthy partner.
You will give a strong positive and unexpected experience, and without any doubt your company will be the first choice when the prospect actually needs your services/products in the future. And not only that, you will be awarded with a faithful customer that can act as a good “viral sneezer” on your behalf. It is better to create a long term business relationship and achieve what is known as a “deeply felt affection” in branding terms rather than a quick one-time deal!
“The core of branding is not to be a known trademark. To have a successful branding is to achieve a status where loyalty reaches a deep emotional level, the so-called “deeply felt affection”. And this “deeply felt affection will without any doubts reflect on your results.”
I have experienced both as a customer and as a marketer that honesty pays, even if it means that you may be sending the potential customer away for the time being.
I was trying to arrange an event abroad. Several challenges came up and these of course needed to be overcome in order to make it happen, make it come true. I was well aware that it was a difficult and complex arrangement due mainly to time constraints, but instead of just giving up and postponing the event, I decided to give it a try. I contacted a large well known travel agency to help me out and the employee sounded very service minded and positive. He understood the challenges and would look into it ASAP. Great, I thought. And I waited, and waited… I never heard from him again, probably because he couldn’t confront me with the truth that he wouldn’t be able to deliver what he had promised me.
In the beginning I took his positive attitude as “good service”, but I eventually realized that a true good service would be if he had told me up front that my request was next to impossible and couldn’t be achieved within the desired time frame. See, that would have been customer-focused and honest but he was probably afraid of losing me as customer. He was keen to give me what he perceived as a good service. Basically he told me what he believed I wanted to hear: That it was possible and he would get back to me with a reply in no time.
If he had said “no” I would have found a new and more realistic date and he would have a very good chance of obtaining my confidence and even my loyalty (and my money).
I have postponed the event – and probably won’t be using this travel agency again, not for this event or for any others. Due to a single employee I now have this travel agency marked as unreliable in my book, which means that I will go to a competitor the next time.
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 Copyright Claudia Stucki Everybody that has anything to do with marketing has heard and used the famous Unique Selling Proposition. What now, what is this UBP all about? It’s very simple.
UBP stands for Unique Buying Proposition. As opposed to the inside-out approach of the USP, the UBP focus the customer needs.
The Unique Buying Proposition states the core benefits the customer experiences from a product or service – FROM THE CUSTOMER’S POINT OF VIEW.
Here is a little example to illustrate the difference between a USP approach and a UBP approach:
| Unique Selling Proposition – USP Approach |
Unique Buying Proposition – UBP Approach |
Domino’s Pizza USP
- “Fresh hot pizza delivered to your door in thirty minutes or less, guaranteed”
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An alternative UBP could be
- We guarantee that your hunger is satisfied in less than 30 minutes.
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Personally I rather work with UBPs so I always keep the focus on the customers’ needs instead of what I think is important in the product or service I’m selling. I find it much more effective. But you really should know what the customer’s needs are – not what you think that they are, otherwise you won’t be able to appeal to the customer.
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I’ve posted a question on Linkedin regarding Boilerplates; what they are and how to use them. It turned out a very interesting discussion and a good complement to my previous post “Boiling the plate”.
Traditional understanding and use of Boilerplates
The original understanding of “boilerplate” refers to a standardized text that is re-used in different circumstances without being changed.
As Bob Kalsey writes in his answer:
“The only place for what is traditionally called “boilerplate” in most business communication is the fine print that companies often require to be placed on all or many of the documents they release. It may include company descriptions or legal, trademark and copyright notices that would appear in ads or at the bottom of press releases and such. These blocks of text are more often the handiwork of lawyers than of creative writers. (…)
(…) communications such as business proposals and personalized sales letters may well contain reusable standard text—boilerplate—that describes the company, its personnel, and the products or services that are the subject of the letter or proposal. (Nearly all of a document may be boilerplate, as with a contract form, when only a few specific details vary from project to project, use to use.) These communications, though, are not intended for mass distribution without customization of the text, to personalize it for the specific recipient.”
Tim Berkesch gives a very practical example on how his company has optimized business using boilerplates:
“Our company also receives Internet leads daily and we have found it necessary to prepare boilerplate material so we can respond to them in a timely manner. Boilerplate material does not have to be something negative for either the sender or the receiver.
Many people who contact us want standard information that can answer questions in order for them to proceed with their vendor evaluation. Anything we can do to provide that information as quickly as possible helps us build a relationship based on being helpful and providing a quick response.”
Boilerplates: Traditional X Modern uses
It’s not a matter of choosing sides; both ways of usage can be very effective depending of what your needs are. You can use the one or the other, or both!
| Traditional use |
Modern use |
- Legal, trademark and copyright notices
- Company descriptions
- Contract forms, proposals etc. (personalized boilerplates)
- Standard answers to information requests
Boilerplates were originally created in an environment where companies acted locally, targeting a homogenous group. They can be used to reply to very specific requests, where the customer does not expect a personal answer but a quick clarification. |
- Tool to be used internally, that facilitates management of communication consistency and flow (please see my post “Boiling the plate”)
Suited for larger companies with heterogeneous target groups and enterprises acting in different countries, targeting different cultures. |
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Update: 03rd. February 2009 – please read the related post “Boiling different plates”
Personally I’ve been addicted to Boilerplates, as I find them a fantastic tool that makes marketing and communication much easier to coordinate and to produce.
A Boilerplate is a piece of text that can be used as basis for any kind of communication, a kind of internal “press release” if you like, stating the message to be transmitted.
What to take into consideration when writing a good Boilerplate:
Background information:
- Description – What it is all about: Are you presenting the company, a service, a product? Here you can include the most important features for the target group. The description of the product is not necessarily an integral part of the Boilerplate text. I’m normally provide it for the sake of the copywriter.
Boilerplate:
- Benefits – The Unique Buying Propositions: What is the value FOR the customer, as THE CUSTOMER would perceive it? (I always emphasize it because we tend to think we know what the customer wants and forget to actually investigate what they really need).
- Differentiation – What makes you better than any alternative (direct or indirect competition), what makes you special. Why YOU and not somebody else?
The boilerplate language should be clear and neutral. The texts created based on the boilerplate should be the ones adapting the language to the target group and tailored to the intended media.
I made a rough sketch illustrating how I work and how I see the relation and flow between the different tools. It’s from the top of my head and I’m probably forgetting something. Please tell me if you find pieces missing!
Let’s call it the Profeta model 
 Copyright Suzana Profeta If I’m going to target a new market segment I have new Unique Buying Propositions to present (I always work with UBP instead of USP, which is the most commonly used) I create a Boilerplate; a short text (no more than a page) presenting the Value Proposition with the new UBPs, just as in a press release. This can also be handed down to a copywriter or journalists if needed.
This text, this Boilerplate, becomes the core of any communication. The Boilerplate is adapted to different media so it can “work” on the internet, on news papers and in any other kind of collateral you are planning to produce.
Every time I have a campaign, launch or any significant marketing activity I ensure that there is a Boilerplate ready together with the most important information so my team or potentially the advertising company are all well prepared and well informed and consequently can do a great job.
If you are wondering why the name “Boilerplate” here is what Wikipedia writes about it:
“Boilerplate is any text that is or can be reused in new contexts or applications without being changed much from the original. (…)
The term dates back to the early 1900s, referring to the thick, tough steel sheets used to build steam boilers. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the much softer and less durable lead alloys used otherwise) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as ‘boilerplates’. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation’s largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.”
I have a template I always use whenever I have a new Value Proposition at hand. Please feel free to ask for it on the “Comments” field below and I will mail it to you.
I already have gotten questions regarding Unique Selling Proposition against Unique Buying Proposition. I guess it will be the theme of the next post!
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