In light of the close defeat for the California GMO-right-to-know ballot initiative in this month’s election, it’s worth reading this article on Sustainable Brands that shows customers want non-GMO even more than they want organic.
They say, “if the people lead, the leaders must follow.” We WILL win this one. Eventually.
(continued from yesterday)
Back in 2000, the PCH sweepstakes mailings inspired this quote in the Direct Mail section of my earlier book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World:
Forget about glitzy, complicated sweepstakes offers, with seemingly dozens of different-sized papers, foils, stickers, and scratch-off cards; your production cost will be enormous before you even start. Besides, they cost you tons of money mailing to and following up on false prospects.
A simple, straightforward approach is far better. Use ordinary paper sizes and stocks, and win the prospect over through the strength of your offer—not gimmicks or packaging. You’ll stay within your budget, and target serious prospects, not a bunch of chiselers hoping for a million dollars from you, Ed McMahon, or the tooth fairy.
That was true when I wrote Grassroots Marketing, and even more true now.
I may get an onslaught of comments pointing out that Publishers Clearing House’s methods are obviously working, or they wouldn’t keep at it after all these decades. Of course they work! I freely grant that.
But to what effect? What’s the real benefit of developing a large list of purely transactional contacts who didn’t necessarily even buy—they entered a chance to win big bucks for free. Do these people have any loyalty? Has PCH done any segmentation other than geographic? Can they market to these people as individuals in any meaningful way?
The negative answer is obvious in the kinds of junk offers crammed into the rest of the PCH sweepstakes envelope: tchatchkes and trinkets and home repair products of dubious value—the sort of stuff that gets sold on late-night TV ads over obscure cable channels. It’s these clueless merchants that I actually feel sorry for.
Thanks, I’m guessing, to the no-junk-mail opt-out list, it had been quite a few years since I’d heard from Publishers Clearing House.
Yup—Publishers Clearing House. The infamous magazine subscription discounter that used to clutter up my mailbox with screamy hype implying very strongly that I’d won some enormous fortune, if only I followed all the (seemed like) 39 steps to claim it.
The same Publishers Clearing House that once sent a mailer to Dance Spree, a community arts group, boldly announcing, “D. Spree, You May Already Have Won a Million Dollars” in a mailmerge whose dot matrix fonts didn’t match the rest of the offset-printed letter.
On a whim, I decided to open the envelope—not with any intention of entering the latest Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, but to see if the business world’s shift over the last dozen years or so in the direction of switching off the hype in favor of softer and more ethical marketing approaches—a shift that I like to think I had at least something to do with—had made any impact on Publishers Clearing House, King of the Old-Style Hype.
The quick answer is no. What I received was a smoother, more sophisticated version of the same junk that Publishers Clearing House has been sending for decades.
Here’s some of what I noticed.
To be continued tomorrow (including a deeper look at the psychology they’re using, and why I discount it).
Yet another company has gotten in trouble for greenwashing. Raz Godelnik writes in Triple Pundit about cereal giant General Mills’ legal woes: multiple lawsuits over deceptive packaging, claiming for example that its Nature Valley brand of granola bars is “all natural” when in fact it’s highly processed and contains such ingredients as maltodextrin.
You’d think by now companies woud have caught on that honesty really is the best policy.
Of course, it would be nice if the word “natural” actually had a legal definition, and thus some teeth. But it would also be nice if a company that claims to be strongly guided by ethics would do a better job of walking its talk.
I sent an article around by Seth Godin, talking about how bullying buyers of expensive items shot themselves in the foot when they try to tear down the seller, or the quality of the item.
My friend Jacqueline Church Simonds from Beagle Bay Books responded with a story of how Mitchell Volvo in Simsbury CT, earned her undying love:
After we expressed interest in the V70 wagon, the dealer sat us down and said, “You’re intelligent, educated buyers. You know how to look on the Internet and see what my competitors are asking for in 5 surrounding states. Here’s the price that makes money for me and gives you a deal besides.”
The only dickering we did was on my 100k Taurus. He was genuinely chagrined he could only give us $2k trade-in on it. Since I’d been trying to sell it for 6 months, I caved. It was better than having it towed.
I’ve yet to find a dealer who treated me as fairly.
Thirteen years later, she still sings that dealer’s praises. Isn’t that what you want your clients and customers to do?
By contrast, I had such a bad experience in 2003 at Northampton Toyota (since sold to a dealer organization that I have no complaints about) in Massachusetts that I wouldn’t even go back there for a tube of touch-up paint until the dealership was sold and the management changed. I won’t give you the whole sordid story, but here’s one piece of it: the phone call a couple of weeks into the process that said “you have 24 hours to get your car out of our lot, and by the way, the engine is in pieces in the trunk.”
Amazingly, when we went in to a local used car dealer to see about replacing this car, he said, “it’s only got 71,000 miles and all it needs is a new engine? You could drive that car for many more years!” He actually brokered a used engine for us and arranged for a specialized shop to install it—giving up an easy sale but earning a lot of referrals from us over the coming years. And he was right; we drove that car eight more years, until 2011.
The ultra-shabby weeks-long encounter with Northampton Toyota’s service department was so bad that I wrote a five-page letter to Toyota’s vice president for US customer service. The response I got from them was too little and waaaay too late (two months to get a form response asking me to call a customer service center that turned out to be in India, with a representative who had not seen and could not access my letter—and another two months to get the letter with the inadequate and inappropriate make-good).
So what did I do the next time I needed a car, a year and a half after this incident? After driving nothing but Toyotas and one Toyota clone (labeled as a Chevrolet Nova) since 1982, I took my money elsewhere, because earning my loyalty was obviously not a priority for this company. I bought a brand new car that for the first time in 22 years, was not a Toyota and not designed by Toyota. Then, last year, the replacement engine on the old Corolla finally gave out, when the car was 14 years old and the odometer read something like 167,000 miles. We did buy a Toyota to replace it, but we bought it used, so no money in Toyota’s pocket on that sale. And just last week, I helped my stepfather buy a new car. He’s had several Toyotas over the years—but he bought a brand new Honda.
In other words, in the past 9 years, the imbecilic treatment we received from the service department combined with the laughable response from corporate has diverted three large sales away from Toyota—three sales that would have been theirs for the taking, if they’d only just made us feel that we mattered.
GreenBiz.com reports on the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC) conference in Washngton: https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/06/12/sustainable-business-comes-white-house
On April 30, 1977, I entered the construction site for the Seabrook (New Hampshire) nuclear power plant. The next day, I was one of 1414 people arrested at the site, while arch-conservative Governor Meldrim Thompson, dressed in combat fatigues, gave orders to the police. Under Thompson’s administration, many protestors were held until May 13.While we were in captivity, William Loeb, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, repeatedy called us “terrorists.”
Fast-forward 35 years. Today, April 14, 2012, I was one of 1500 or 2000 people attending a rally in Brattleboro, Vermont to shut down the deeply troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear plant—which, under Vermont law and agreements signed by the plant owner, should have been shut down and has been operating illegally since its license expired. Ironically, the plant sits on the Connecticut River, which is the border between Vermont and New Hampshire.
Only this time, the governor, and most of the state, was on our side. Governor Peter Shumlin was the featured speaker, and he outlined ten specific lies or broken promises on the part of New Orleans-based Entergy, which owns the plant.
Along with Governor Shumlin, US Senator Bernie Sanders, Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, and several state legislators from both Vermont and neighboring Masachusetts were on the program or sent greetings. Vermont’s lone US House Representative, Peter Welch, sent greetings, leaving only Senator Patrick Leahy out of the event among Vermont’s three-member Congressional delegation.
Yes, we’ve won over at least one state government. But our work is not done until this very dangerous plant—a plant that was unsafe even when it was new, and which uses the same totally discredited GE Mark I design as Fukushima-Daiichi—is shut down. Until Entergy honors its promises. And until all nuclear plants in the US and around the world are shut down before catastrophe happens.
Is this crazy? The News Journal, Wilmington, Delaware’s Gannett-owned major newspaper, offered blogger Kristopher Brooks a reporter job. He blogged about it. And the paper withdrew the offer—before Brooks even started work.
The termination came just one day after Jim Romensko, whose blog is must-reading in the journalism world, posted a story about it.
As both a business ethics expert and as a journalist/blogger who has been writing news and features for more than 40 years, I heard the story and looked at the press release (linked above). It was a bit over the top and certainly at odds with the mainstream journalism pretense of objectivity.
But cause to withdraw the offer? Not even close. One presumes that they knew going in they were getting an outspoken, opinionated *blogger* who would be quite likely to do something like that. They didn’t hire a straightlaced just-the-facts reporter. So unless they told him upfront, don’t blog about this or run it by us before you post, from a business ethics viewpoint, they crossed the line by withdrawing the offer.
From the view of the suits who run the paper, I totally understand why they wouldn’t want a perceived “loose cannon” or someone with that big an ego running around and injecting himself into the stories he writes. For every Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe who injects himself into the narrative, thousands of mainstream reporters toil in near-anonymity, writing pieces that only a seasoned analyst would be able to recognize as theirs—that’s what journalists are trained to do.
But if that’s what the paper was looking for, the editorial team that hired him should have run both sides of Brooks—the anonymous mainstream reporter and the flamboyant blogger—by the suits before making the offer. Once the offer was made, it should have been honored, barring a much more outrageous violation of journalistic norms (like being discovered making up sources).
Also—I say this without any knowledge of the paper’s diversity and hiring practices, just wondering out loud—I do wonder if a white reporter would have received the same treatment.
The stated justification (I’d call it an excuse) was that Brooks used the paper’s logo and quoted his offer letter without permission. If you believe that, I’ve got a nice antique bridge to sell you across the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan. All they would have had to do was call him and ask him to take down the logo and not quote the offer. The first would take about 20 seconds, the second, a few minutes of changing quotes into paraphrases.
Wearing my journalist hat, I went and had a look at the rest of Brooks’s blog. Not surprisingly, he frequently lifts logos and other materials, as he comments on them—so the paper does not have any plausible excuse about not knowing he would use the logo. This is very common occurrence in the blogosphere; many bloggers comment on other news stories, and using a graphic element from the original story happens constantly. As a blogger (‘scuse me while I switch hats), I’m commenting on a story right now. It’s not my style to borrow the masthead where the story appeared, but really, is there a qualitative difference? In the blogosphere, use of a logo does not imply endorsement by the owner of the logo, so what’s the big deal?
Brooks also blogs frequently on the stories he covers as a journalist, and his role in them. Gannett cannot use the excuse of ignorance. Any competent hiring committee would have looked at the blog during the evaluation process.
Want more on blogs vs. traditional journalism? In my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I discuss business ethics, out-of-the-box public relations, blogs, and the new journalism climate ion some detail.
But why would you want to? If you want to market dishonestly, the person you’re really fooling is yourself. Because it is not effective in the long run, and the long run is what builds a business.
Two examples:
The Secret Spammer
Someone posted this on a LinkedIn discussion today:
The promotion plan used by [company name] works very well. [company URL]
Always on the lookout for good resources for myself and my clients, I clicked through. First thing I saw was the same guy’s picture, so this was not exactly an unbiased recommendation. And then after clicking in a couple of pages, I found this:
The email blast and daily email advertising to 4 million recipients will cost you only $35 for a lifetime membership. (not included in the package) However, you will learn how to use emailing effectively, what company or companies to use, and how to effectively send email ads.
4 million e-mails a day over multiple days? If that’s not spam, I don’t know what is. There’s no way this list is targeted, and there’s no way it will help the reputation of any product associated with it. So I responded:
I am sorry, but I looked at your site, Fred (and it would be nice if you were more up front about your relationship to it)–you’re going to send 4 million e-mails for an author? That is SPAM–a wretched curse on the planet. It makes everything else you offer to do suspect.
I have a section in one of my books called “Spam–the newbies’ natural mistake.” You’re not a newbie, though. The site is professionally designed and convincing on first glance. So you know better. Why are you doing this?
If you use sleazy, illegal, unpleasant tactics, that’s how people will think of your book. I will NOT be recommending this one to my clients.
The Bait-and-Switch Home Contractor
A few months ago, I bought a Groupon from a heating-duct cleaning service. But when the technician arrived, he told me the $69 duct cleanout was only good if I first signed up for a $1900 heating system overhaul. No upgrade? Then no work.
This is dumb on so many levels! First of all, you never require an upsell. That’s called bait-and-switch, and is illegal, for good reason. Second, if you try to upsell somebody, your offer should be in tune with the original price. so maybe you offer a $99 or $109 upgrade to your $69 original offer. You’re not going to get many takers if your upsell is 27.53 times the original price, pushing it from two figures to four. Third, if you want to sell someone something 27 times the original price, you need to build trust and show you’re capable of the small stuff. And fourth, if you’re using an outside lead generation system (in this case, Groupon), you don’t want to piss them off. I am sure I am not the only one who got a full credit of my $69 from Groupon, which offers a satisfaction guarantee. How willing will Groupon be to ever work with this company again if some huge percentage of sales have to be refunded?
As Abraham Lincoln allegedly said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
And as I say, “if you build a business by fooling people, the worst fool is yourself.”
In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I talk at some length about long-term customer relationships—how they are key to repeat business, and how repeat customers are five to ten times more profitable than using traditional marketing to bring in new customers. If you have to keep dredging the lakes for people you haven’t ripped off yet, your business is not sustainable.
So, for both ethical and practical reasons, do the right thing and don’t be like either of those fools I cited.
A complete customer service nightmare, not to mention I made the mistake of trusting my data to this bunch of losers.
Last April, I bought one year of the SafeSync data protection program, that supposedly backs up my files to a server on the cloud. About ten days ago, I accidentally deleted an important file. So I strolled over to the Trend Micro site, and attempted to retrieve the file.
After all, whenever I click on the software, it smiles at me and tells me that all my files are up to date.
It wasn’t there.
Not only wasn’t it there, but the last time that folder was backed up was in July! I wish I’d taken a screen shot. I haven’t changed any of the settings since I set up the program.
So of course, I initiated a customer service request. And my request apparently led some employee at Trend to delete my entire backup, so I could not demonstrate that it stopped working.
Today I spent an hour on the phone with a tech, who was not able to locate any of my files. At this point, having utterly lost confidence in the product, I asked for a refund. I was told, first by Miss Clueless (who was, BTW, a very poor listener) and then later by Richard, her supervisor, that I would have needed to request that refund by 30 days after purchase. Then Richard tried to blame it on me, saying the empty data folder meant I had installed it improperly. I pointed out that I could see the first three months of files when I’d logged on earlier in the month. I pointed out that I had paid for a year of service, and that after 30 days, it was still working properly. No refund. I tried to escalate. He said “I’ll save you time. There will be no refund” and did not honor my request to talk to his supervisor.
Hello! I bought a year of backup data security; I received, apparently, three months
I am therefore adding to my list of missions to save you from buying anything from a company whose product lies to its customers, whose customer service staff is atrocious and which does not stand behind its product. All they had to do was give me back my $61. I would not have been happy about the lost data, but at least I would not have been charged for services not received. But they can’t be bothered, and I’m not going to get any work done until I vent. I’m pretty steamed at the moment.
In addition to safeSync (yeah, real safe!), they also make an antvirus product called Titanium and a cyberblocker called Online Guardian. And a suite called Internet Security Pro, and an eneterprise security program called Endpoint Security. Guess what I won’t be buying! A company this lacking in business ethics shoots itself in the foot. They clearly have no concept of customer service as either marketing or damage control.
My blog gets automatically posted to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, with over 10,000 total connections. I hope I can save a few of those people from wasting money with a company that doesn’t care.
