Though I sympathise with the Bill Hicks' 'all marketers should die' rant that Johnnie Moore re-discovered on You Tube lately, I'd exclude the creators of this, just because it's so creatively cheeky:


















It's a flyer for a pizza company, disguised as a pizza delivery boy that you see through your front door spy hole. Here's how they do it:








Spotted on the Firewire blog.

...low expectations.

When you have no choice and you are disappointed, the world is responsible.

When you have 100s of choices and you are still not happy with the ones you make, you blame yourself.

The more options we have, the more we regret what we didn't choose. This opportunity cost becomes a lingering regret that subtracts from the satisfaction of the choice.

That’s a distillation of the core of Barry Schwartz's excellent book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, which Schwartz says he wrote after counting 175 different salad dressings and 75 iced teas on his local supermarket shelves and thinking, “This is crazy”.

If you have the time, here's a 20 minute talk Barry Schwartz gave at Ted on how the abundance of choice makes us (consumers) unhappy. Think about it if part of your customer strategy is the assumption that offering more choice makes customers happier.

The Wired headline is what attracted me: Physicist Debunks Cellphone Viral Popcorn Videos.

The latest consensus from the myth-busting Snopes.com and others is that the video apparently showing popcorn popping when placed on a table with three mobiles around it is probably an attempt at viral marketing from a cellphone manufacturer. If so, what it reinforced in my mind is that you can only really viral market if you pretend you are not viral marketing. If that's the case, the deceit goes on.

Also, if it is indeed guerilla marketing, then it highlights how inverted the new marketing is compared with the existing marketing principles most still work to: you have to not look as if you are pointing at your brand; and highlighting the one thing the mobile phone industry doesn't like being highlighted - the argument about whether mobiles fry brains - is exactly what is highlighted here. So, if it is marketing is it anti-marketing using reverse psychology? Who knows...It's beyond me.

Reminds me of some work on subliminal marketing I did for the New Statesman a few years ago, which I will dig out and look at again and, if it's relevant and still interesting, will post here. Anyway, here's the possibly viral marketing campaign for a cellphone. Hey, I'm passing it on. Must work after all. That's me hoisted with my own petard, then (whatever that actually means)...I would think it's just a prank, but they look and sound to me like ad agency people acting.

I’m re-reading Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth. He’s the CEO who turned around the Scandinavian airline SAS.

He starts the book with these four statements. They are a mini manifesto for getting people engaged and energized throughout the organization. The four rules apply particularly to the steps you need to take to free up your front line people to serve customers more effectively.

1. Everyone needs to know and feel that he or she is needed

2. Everyone wants to be treated as an individual

3. Giving someone the freedom to take responsibility releases resources that would otherwise remain concealed

4. An individual without information cannot take responsibility. An individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.

Source: Taken from the opening of Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth.

Labels: Carlzon, Moments of Truth

I was invited to breakfast a few weeks ago at the home of Charles Handy, the business guru and author. So I didn’t look too ill-informed or stupid, I read his latest book 'Myself and Other More Important Matters' before going for breakfast.

In the book, Handy reminds us that if our direct reports, co-workers, front line colleagues etc., do not feel valued or do not feel that they matter, they can easily take it out on the people they do have some power over - your customers.

Here’s what he wrote:

"In one recent survey, seventy-two percent of workers said that they were dissatisfied with their organization. Nineteen percent said that they actively wanted to sabotage it.

"…Frustrated workers can be tempted to activate the negative power that even the most humble possess. The woman in the call center who puts the phone down on me, the waiter who ignores me, the airline employee who closes the gate just as they see me rushing up - they may be exercising their negative power because it was the only way they had of demonstrating that they mattered.”