Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environmenl, Innovation, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

Glass Doors in Metro Station
Platform entry gate on the Shanghai Metro (courtesy of Wikipedia)

[This is the first of three observation posts about China. In the coming weeks, I expect to also look at westernization/managing rapid growth and dissent.]

On our recent trip to China, we explored three different cities by underground rapid transit. Shanghai and Xian call their system the metro, while in Beijing, it’s the subway.

By any name, the train system is a wonder. Signs and recorded announcements are bilingual and clear, all the exits are numbered, the trains are fast, frequent clean, and quiet—and crowded.

Xian has only two lines, in part because several digs to expand the system have unearthed archeological treasures. It will have three more in the coming years. Shanghai and Beijing have many more.

In cities as large as these (8 million to 25 million), keeping people out of cars is very much a public good, Traffic congestion is already a misery, as is pollution. Plus, rapid transit is far more environmentally benign than transporting even 1/4 as many via private cars. In other words, the more people can use the trains, the better it will be on the street. Thus, it’s no surprise that the trains are very inexpensive, and cover a lot of ground. The zoned systems cost just 3 yuan (about 40 cents) for the shortest distance in Beijing and Shanghai and only 2 yuan in Xian; in Beijing, at least, much of the city core seems to be in the first zone. A ride all the way to the Shanghai airport costs 7 yuan. Regular commuters can get reusable fare cards and pay even less.

In Beijing, the system extends some 30 or so miles out to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace, perhaps even farther in some directions. The maximum fare of 10 yuan is based on a distance of 92 to 112 kilometers; the airport train costs 25 yuan (about USD $4).

Advertisers are likely to be a factor in the low cost; they monetize their captive audiences; Shanghai and Beijing are the first subways I’ve ever encountered that redesigned the standee straps to fit ads, and also project ads on the walls of the tunnels as the trains pass through. Oddly,  Shanghai had no ad placards in the usual place between the doors and the ceiling, though Beijing did.

To board a train, first you get your bags screened by the first of many security people you’ll encounter, then select the destination line from an electronic system map. At that point, you choose Chinese or English; select your station and number of passengers, insert your money, and take your farecard. Hold it over the turnstile sensor, enter, and either feed your ticket back to the turnstile or scan it (if you have more fares left) as you exit. Once on the platform, confirm the direction by checking the strip maps on the platform, which clearly show the stations yet to come.

On all three systems, at least some lines wall off the tracks from the platform, like an airport tram or an elevator (see picture above). Doors open in the wall when a train is docked. I was puzzled at this at first, as it seems an unnecessary expense and complexity. But then I thought about what rush hour might look like in a city of 24 or 25 million residents. With the walls, not only is litter eliminated as a safety hazard, but no one can fall or be pushed onto the tracks. However, in Beijing, several lines use open platforms, and their cars seem newer, so this experiment may be proving less-than-successful.

Western cities don’t face quite the daunting challenges of these megacities—but congestion, pollution, and resource use are definitely factors for urban planners. Here are a few principles they may want to borrow from the Chinese:

  • Make the line user-friendly to both locals and tourists—use clear signage
  • Keep it as affordable as possible
  • Keep it clean (all three systems were spotless, and we’d often see cleaners working the platforms)
  • Design the routes to bring people to the places they want and need to go, and run the trains often enough to keep up with demand
  • Label every exit not only with street names (useless to visitors, for the most part) but also with a letter or number; then locals can give directions that begin with the right exit number.

It’s worth noting that Shanghai also has a very high-tech ultra-high-speed magnetic levitation (MagLev) train, which costs significantly more to use and apparently takes a great deal of energy to run. Top rated speed is 430km/h. We saw it from the highway, but were never in a position to try it out. You can take it from the airport for 50 yuan (about USD $8).

Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics-International, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The US presidential race is full of outsiders this year. Trump gets lots of attention in the media–but Sanders seems to be having more of an impact on policy questions, and on bringing disenfranchised-feeling voters in from outside the electoral process.

There are many parallels between Sanders on the left and Trump on the right–both of them attracting attention for being firmly OUTSIDE the mainstream, and both waging far more successful campaigns than the pundits predicted. And they both look and sound like the New Yorkers they are.

But in many other ways other ways, of course, they’re completely different: Unlike Trump, Sanders is…

1. Seriously concerned about making things better for those who are not wealthy, and basing this on a 50-year record of activism (vs. concern only about making things better for Trump and a few others of enormous class privilege).
2. Thoughtful, willing to engage on issues, analyzes more deeply than most candidates with charisma.
3. A populist fundraising champion who does not fund his campaign with–and thus is not beholden to–corporate money or party money, but from millions of ordinary people. I don’t think this has been done before on this scale (vs. Trump self-funding out of his personal fortune and claiming that this makes him honest because he’s the one doing the buying of politicians instead of being bought by them)
4. Someone who tells the truth (Trump has been caught in more lies than any of the others).
5. A successful coalition builder who has a track record of working well with people who think differently

But even Cruz and Rubio (and certainly dropouts Carson and Fiorina) are outliers too. It is scary to see the Republican Party start to coalesce around the very scary Ted Cruz, who only looks rational because Trump is so far in right field that he moves the public perception of what’s mainstream. When Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (a slasher of the safety net) is considered a centrist, we have a serious distortion in perception vs. reality.

So the big lesson I take away is this: when four out of the five most popular candidates this year are outside the mainstream, the mainstream had better look at why, and what they can do about it. With the exception of Clinton, all the mainstream candidates are out of the race–even presumptive GOP nominee (as of last summer) Jeb Bush.

Me? I agree with at least 80% of what Sanders says, and was happy to vote for him in our March 1 Massachusetts primary.

Oh yes, and let’s not forget the role of the media in king/queen making and unmaking. One of Sanders’ other strengths is in engaging millennials who are good at creating their OWN (social) media–while defeating the myth that a self-declared socialist can’t run a serious campaign for national office in the US.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, language, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Senator Bernie Sanders, looking relaxed
Senator Bernie Sanders, looking relaxed

A friend and I were discussing the presidential election, and he brought up the tired old shibboleth that the Democrats got so badly burned on George McGovern’s 1972 campaign that they don’t feel any progressive candidate is electable.

I will concede some surface similarities: both are/were genuine progressives who can ignite the youth vote, neither had the support of the party elite, both were critical of the war machine.

But if anything, I’d say McGovern is more accurately compared to the failed campaigns of Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry—and even John McCain.

Now—why is Bernie’s campaign different?

  1. Unlike the Dukakis disaster, the Republicans can’t make “liberal” sound like a curse word. Bernie is more than liberal. He’s progressive. He is an open socialist, so calling him a socialist has no traction; we all know that already, and it doesn’t seem to be hurting his performance.
  2. He has a track record of coalition building and getting things done both as an executive (as Mayor of Vermont’s largest city, where he served multiple terms and continues to be enormously popular) and as a legislator.
  3. His fundraising prowess is astounding, and has been outside the mainstream Democratic party channels. It’s new money coming into the party. While Trump can claim he’s not beholden because he’s funding his own campaign, he is closely allied with his fellow billionaires. Bernie is a candidate of the people and supported financially by the people.
  4. Bernie has enormous integrity—and that makes him unique in the current crop of candidates. Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Rubio have all been accused of various shady dealings (as was Gore).
  5. Bernie’s strength on the left and Trump’s on the right shows clearly that the old style of politics-as-usual is out of favor. About the only thing they have in common (other than their NYC roots) is that their campaigns have been fueled by enormous voter disaffection with politics-as-usual.
  6. He uses social media better than anyone else in the race—and this is one of several reasons he polls so well with Millennials.
  7. Unlike McGovern, Dukakis, Kerry, or McCain, Sanders is a skilled orator who really knows how to work a crowd.
  8. He polls better than Clinton in match-ups against all the Republican candidates.
  9. Ambitious agendas are always more popular than treading water. Clinton urges us to tread water—to protect Obamacare, to accept the economic crumbs falling off the silk tablecloths of the 1%—to keep things as they are. Bernie urges us to think big. It’s the same message of hope and change that inspired millions of first-time voters to come out for Obama. But Obama was a centrist running as if he were a progressive, and he let a lot of those people down. Sanders has been putting his beliefs into action for decades. And he can show consistency over time, unlike the flip-flopping Clinton and Trump.
  10. His positions would actually help the majority of voters if they became policy.
  11. He’s attacking an enemy that is disliked (Wall Street). And he’s reaching out to all the constituencies Trump (and to a lesser extent the other GOP candidates) has attacked.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Politics Tagged with , , , ,
Supreme Court, 2009 (Photo)
In this 2009 portrait of the Supreme Court, Scalia is third from the right. Public domain photo found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supreme_Court_US_2009.jpg

Dear Senators McConnell, Cruz, Grassley, etc,

President Obama has over eleven months left in office. Senator McConnell, your call not to fill the Supreme Court vacancy until after a new President has taken office is not surprising from the man who greeted the Obama administrations earliest days with the statement that his highest priority was to “deny President Obama a second term.” Senator McConnell, you been obstructionist from the get-go. Politico calls you “the face of Republican obstructionism.” This is the latest in a long line of unpatriotic—I might even say treasonous—refusals on the part of the Republican leadership to advance almost any part of Obama’s “change” agenda. From here, it sure looks like racism; no president in my memory has ever faced such unrelenting hostility.

Not only is there no reason to delay this nomination almost a year, but history supports quick action. In fact, both McConnell and Grassley voted to seat Justice Anthony Kennedy, in February, 1988—Reagan’s last year. The vote was 97-0, with three Democrats absent.

The record is clear. Of the seven instances in the 20th century where a Supreme Court vacancy opened in an election year, the Senate confirmed six, most of them quite rapidly. The seventh was not about waiting for a new president to be elected but about the Senate being in recess as a new Court season was about to start. Eisenhower made a recess appointment of William Brennan (of the opposite party) just weeks before the 1956 election; he was confirmed when the Senate went back into session (and Eisenhower had been re-elected) in early 1957.

There was one rather different situation: Abe Fortas, already on the Court and nominated by Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to become Chief Justice. Ethics considerations were the main reason this nomination went nowhere, though the argument about the change of administration was raised.

Senator McConnell and your cronies: Though you have been utterly disrespectful to the Administration and have ignored the strong mandate for change that elected Obama twice, we have been patient. Our patience is at an end. If you do not let the nomination go forward, we will not just flood you with calls and letters. We will picket you again and again. We will engage in appropriate nonviolent action. And we will do our best to bring about a Democratic supermajority in both houses of Congress.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

I deeply resent Hillary Clinton’s message that we can’t go for what we really want. Barack Obama beat her in ’08 because his message was “hope” and “yes we can.” He made some of that a reality in spite of tremendous resistance–more than I’ve ever seen for ANY president’s policies. But he would have gotten much more accomplished if he’d continued organizing: bringing the same coalition that led him to victory into supporting his agenda and pressuring that reluctant Congress. As a former community organizer, he should have known this.

Bill Clinton’s presidency shows the dangers of the HRC approach. By dismissing any effort at real change right from the start, he allowed himself, over and over again, to back away from meaningful change and turn what should have been the post-negotiation fallback position into the starting gate, and then allow that to be whittled down further until the change was so small that Grover Norquist actually could drown it in a bathtub.

Obama made the same mistake. “Single payer isn’t on the table but we have a public option” turned into. “no public option.” And the ACA as finally passed was a giveaway to insurance companies. Yes, it made people’s live’s better and I’m glad it passed. But Obama squandered the potential for much deeper reform.

Isn’t it so much better to aim for what you really want and get only three-quarters of the way than to aim for what you think is “achievable”—and still get only three-quarters of the way? It’s a very rare football play that gets a touchdown from the kick-off point. Much more commonly, the team advances the ball, play by play, and starts again from the end point of the last play. Then they get the touchdown.

It took 100 years to eliminate slavery in the US. It took another 100 to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, and it may be another 100 before the cancer of racism is nothing but a memory. It has already taken about 80 years to get even the wimpy ACA; that doesn’t mean we say we don’t need to make more progress. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to tear down the ACA before you have something better in place.

Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

Muhammad Ali put it this way:

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

And I personally have taken on the “impossible” goal of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—at a profit. Taking my cue from Ali, when I speak on this, my talk is called “Impossible is a Dare!” I’ve also written a book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, that demonstrates how these future victories are actually quite possible. I’ve done “impossible” things before. Why restrict ourselves by thinking small?

I have other issues with Hillary besides her willingness to settle for less even before the negotiations start. HRC’s ties to Wall Street make me nervous. Her hawkish rhetoric, even more so. And her Middle East policy is just plain shameful. As an American Jew, I stand up and say “Israel right or wrong” is as misguided as “America right or wrong” was in the Vietnam era—and I further say that we progressives knew that going into Iraq as we did was a terrible mistake. I was out there in the streets with millions of other Americans, saying “don’t do this, it will be a disaster.” There is zero justification for her vote to support the worst foreign policy disaster in history.

I will proudly—excitedly—vote for Bernie in the primary. Nonetheless, if Hillary is the nominee—and she probably will, due in part to Party rules that allocate delegates to high-status mainstream Democrats over and above those allocated in elections—I would support her unequivocally over any of the Republicans running. I think she has a good heart, I’d much rather see her in charge of picking the next members of the Supreme Court than any of that bunch, and I would see her election—as I saw Obama’s—as getting us closer on the path from the kick-off to the goal.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Democracy, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,
Top of a special Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice cream
Top of a Bernie Sanders fundraising offer involving a very special custom pint of ice cream
Farther down the page, showing the whole container
Farther down the page, showing the whole container

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you already know I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. And if you read this blog regularly, you know I’m both a long-time student of marketing and a long-time advocate of marketing with honesty and integrity.

In light of this, I received a mailing from one of the groups allied with the Sanders campaign, and immediately noticed some things I wanted to share.

  • The product is totally in keeping with Bernie’s message, talking about the “1%” chocolate layer on top of the ice cream
  • The video featuring Ben Cohen explaining the flavor to Jerry Greenfield, is hilarious, especially where he talks about breaking through the one percent barrier to spread the wealth (the chocolate) throughout the pint
  • Most marketers, when faced with the opportunity to offer a single unique item, set a stratospheric price—but even with a total production run of just fifty, and only one being given to this organization, the price is only $50 (once again reinforcing the brand messaging)
  • However, it’s something of a lottery; only one person gets the prize, but anyone who contributes $50 or more by the deadline gets to play
  • There are also a number of less exclusive rewards—democratizing the lottery somewhat.

If you’d like to see the other prizes, or make a donation and enter the raffle (deadline is tomorrow), visit https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/wewantbernie

Disclaimer and disclosures: I am not involved in any way with organizing this promotion and don’t benefit financially. I have given money to the Sanders campaign and I’ve probably also given money to Progressive Democrats of America, the sponsoring organization.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business Ethics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Politics, propaganda, Psychology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

A friend of mine, a very successful author and marketer, a deep student of the human psyche, asked on Facebook, “Why do you love/hate Trump? (Disclaimer: I’m indifferent.)”

It was the disclaimer that got me worried. This is part of my response to him:

I have enormous respect for your analytical skills, M.______, but I question deeply your indifference…

M.______, I hope you’re pulling our legs. You of all people understand human motivations and psychology. Trump is a master marketer and manipulator. I don’t know if he’s studied NLP [Neurolinguistic Programming] (or maybe you) or if he’s actually a natural.

I do know that if he wins, I will be looking seriously at what other country I might live in for the next 4 to 8 years. I have family who died in Nazi concentration camps. I don’t want to be part of an America where ordinary citizens are rounded up because they’re Muslim or Mexican, just as my parents’ cousins were for being Jewish.

I don’t say this lightly. I consider him extremely dangerous, and it scares me that enough people in the US take him seriously enough that he’s doing well in the polls (we’ll see if this translates to actual votes).

 Some things I didn’t say to my friend:
In the courtyard of the new Reich Chancellery, the Fuhrer partakes of the "one-pot" communal stew meal in the company of invited fellow citizens. Photo by Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy New York Public Library
In the courtyard of the new Reich Chancellery, the Fuhrer partakes of the “one-pot” communal stew meal in the company of invited fellow citizens. Photo by Heinrich Hoffman, courtesy New York Public Library
 But my deep message to my friend is that we cannot afford indifference. Let’s remember that Hitler was democratically elected, and that Berlin in the 20s was a liberal, arts-centered city. We must not get complacent. We must not think “it can’t happen here.” And we must not be swallowed by indifference.
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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,
Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

In the fall of 2011, my doctor told me, “you’re on the border for diabetes.” That scared me into action. I’d been aiming for an hour of exercise per day and requiring myself a minimum of 30 minutes (travel days and the very rare sick days excepted). I immediately doubled that. (I also looked at my diet.)

For the next three+ years, I dutifully tracked the number of minutes of exercise I did each day—but I didn’t track the results cumulatively. My pound-shedding had plateaued, and I decided that starting on January 1, 2015, I’d log the minutes each day on that month’s calendar page.

At the end of January, I totaled it up—and was shocked to discover that far too great a percentage were much too close to the one-hour mark. Although I did have 9 days where I exceeded 120 (including two days of 160 minutes) and four days at exactly 120, that meant I failed to make two hours 22 out of 31 days. I had too many with numbers like 63, 65, 75, and even one total bust with only 30 minutes. Tracking over the course of the month made me realize how I was letting myself cheat. My total exercise for January 2015 was only 2277 minutes, with a paltry daily average of 73.45.

But here’s the thing: because I was tracking, I was able to adjust. For the remaining 11 months, I never got less than 3290 minutes (February). Many of them were in the 3600 to 3900 range, and in October, I actually went past 4000. The difference even between 2277 and 3290 is an extra 16.88 hours of exercise between January and February—not too shabby. I ended the year with 42,178 minutes of exercise, or an average of 115.55 minutes a day. If I drop January off the average, it goes to 119.46, or just a whisker under my goal of 120 minutes. Because I was tracking, I ended the year averaging an hour and fifty-five minutes, versus an hour and thirteen in January. That’s a significant increase.

Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman
Shel reading at the exercise bike. Photo by D. Dina Friedman

Since I do a lot of my reading (and a lot of my exercise, especially in the winter) on the exercise bike, I decided to also track how many books I read. In 2015, I read 89 books. Some of these were monsters in the 500 or 600-page range. Others were quick and easy Young Adult novels of 100-150 pages. Many were business/environmental/social change books, including at least one a month for my review column. But I read more fiction and memoir, by far. This is an outgrowth of a resolution I made several years ago to do at least five minutes of pleasure reading per day. Once I started using the exercise bike regularly, this was a resolution that was easy to exceed.
The proof? I went back to the doctor this summer, and my blood work was all in the normal range (yay!).

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/

This 1979 profile of Donald Trump in the Village Voice should be mandatory reading–in the Know Your Enemy department. The corruption, refusal to acknowledge responsibility, self-aggrandizement, and use of other people’s money are not at all surprising. Only two things surprised me: 1) the racism goes back so far in time. I’d always thought that was a “party dress” he put on in order to run a demagogue campaign for president–but he was apparently the enforcer keeping blacks out of his father’s apartments.

2) The notorious McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, one of the sleaziest figures in 20th-century US politics, was one of the family’s lawyers.

If Donald Trump becomes the nominee (or runs 3rd-party), we need to distill some of the central points into a highly readable one-page flier and get it absolutely everywhere. If Trump is the nominee, I will personally do that flier. And I want a legion of volunteers to distribute it.

Side note: I’m proud to say my mom was one of those white Urban League volunteers mentioned in the article, who determined if an apartment was *really* “already rented” after a family of color was refused. I have no idea if she was involved in the Trump Village investigation–probably not, since she lived far away in the Bronx.

I do find it deeply ironic that he has managed to build a meme that as a “self-made man,” he has so much money, he can’t be bought. He and his father got their money in the first place by leveraging political connections and doing deals with little or no skin in the game, if the article is accurate (and I have high confidence that it is).  What is self-made is not his wealth, but his image.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,
The brain of a call center clerk ("Call Center Dave," by Ray Smithers)
The brain of a call center clerk ("Call Center Dave," by Ray Smithers)-graphic
The brain of a call center clerk (“Call Center Dave,” by Ray Smithers)

Dear business owners and bureaucrats: If you fill your customer positions with stupid people, or if you don’t empower them to address issues that come up, you damage your own brand.

All customer service people are by definition part of your marketing team. If they perform badly, they drive customers away.

I’ve just had one-too-many encounters with a stupid person in a customer service position, and I realize I won’t get any real work done until I can blow off some steam. So I may as well blow that steam as a blog post. I’m overdue for a good rant in this space.

I’m helping an 85-year-old, not-very-computer-savvy Japanese citizen renew his passport. The Japanese Consulate Boston website says their online renewal form only works with PCs; my friend has a 12-year-old Mac. So I called them to get an application form mailed to him.

The idiot I spoke to was amazingly UNhelpful. First she said we had to send a self-addressed 9×12 envelope to Boston with $1.20 in postage just to get the forms. And then she refused to give me the consulate’s address and told me to get it off the website (which is in Japanese, which I don’t read). I actually had to yell at her before I could pry the street address out of her.

You would think they could simply mail out the packet, and tack an extra $5 onto the renewal fee if using postal mail.

This has the effect of pushing Japan farther down on the list of countries I’d like to visit.

It also got me thinking about the hundreds of times I’ve encountered an employee charged with “customer service” who either didn’t have a clue about what customer service actually means, or haven’t been empowered to actually deal with situations that come up.

I’m remembering in particular the time (about ten years before they went out of business) that I was in a Blockbuster Video and I saw a sign with great language about how they empowered every one of their employees to do right by their customers. I was writing a book on marketing (as usual 😉 ) at that time, and I asked the counter clerk for permission to photograph the sign so I could quote it in my book. And this disempowered employee in this supposedly enlightened store said he didn’t have authority and I’d need to ask headquarters!

It wasn’t so much his inability to let me do what I asked. It was the disconnect between what the sign said and the 180-degree-opposite reality that completely wrecked my perception of Blockbuster’s brand. I never set foot in a Blockbuster again. They lost a decade of my business for being stupid.

Then there was the chief mechanic at my local Toyota dealer, who called me after several days of non-response to my status queries and told me I had 24 hours to get my car off his lot, and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk. I was so appalled I wrote a long letter to the VP of customer service for the United States, and I never went back to that dealer for anything else, ever, not even a tube of touch-up paint. I drove 40 extra miles round trip when I needed something from a Toyota dealer. And the next time I bought a new car, it wasn’t a Toyota. That mechanic threw away 20 years of brand loyalty and a lifetime customer value in the hundreds of thousands.

Let me say it differently: front-line customer service reps are either your marketing ambassadors (think Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton) or your marketing saboteurs. Which do you choose to represent you?

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