Summer’s here – or at least, in theory it is.

It’s mid-August, school is out, and people are on holiday. Never mind that it’s only 15 degrees and we’ve seen more rain in the past few weeks than for the last year.

And what’s a little bad [...]]]> Do you understand what makes your customers tick? Really?

Summer’s here – or at least, in theory it is.

It’s mid-August, school is out, and people are on holiday. Never mind that it’s only 15 degrees and we’ve seen more rain in the past few weeks than for the last year.

And what’s a little bad weather anyway when it comes to enjoying yourself? Slip on your takkies, pull out the braai and have a lekker jol.

Come again? I hear you say. Has he taken leave of his senses?

Well no. Or rather, yes, temporarily, but it’s all in a good cause. Stick with me, and it’ll become clear.

If you understand any of the lingo above, chances are you’ve spent some time either in South Africa, or with South Africans. And in the process, you’ve tuned in to the way they talk.

So you know that it’s time to slip on your trainers (it being warm and all), pull out the barbecue and have a grand old time.

And if you haven’t been to SA or mixed with Seffricans, perhaps you’ve simply taken the time to read Visit Britain’s latest market profiles.

Released in advance of the London Olympics, they’re a mine of useful information on the cultural quirks of tourists who are expected to flood to these shores in two years’ time.

Don’t mention the…

If a Japanese person smiles at you, what should you assume?

That they’re not happy, of course.

Be careful when pouring wine for an Argentinian – do it backwards and they’ll take offence. Arabs don’t like being told what to do and Indians can appear rude.

Try not to wink at somebody from Hong Kong. If a South African says they were held up at the robots, they simply mean the traffic lights were against them. (Unless they really were held up at the traffic lights, in which case I’d change the subject if I were you.)

Never call a Canadian an American. And never mention the war to…

…a Mexican, of course. That would be the US-Mexican War of 1846-8, naturally.

But then I expect you knew that.

Knowing me, knowing you

Behind the odd assortment of mildly amusing national traits is a serious purpose, of course.

Visit Britain wants to make sure that even more people do what 30m have done annually in recent years.

Visit Britain.

And sensitising hoteliers, restaurateurs and other tourism professionals to the cultural differences is a powerful way of giving customers what they want.

The lives of others

When you’re communicating with clients, prospects and…well, with anyone you want to communicate with, you need to remember one simple rule.

It’s not about you. It’s about them.

So how do you connect with them? Well how about trying to :

• Lose yourself. Here’s a simple exercise: pick up the first piece of marketing material that comes to hand, or check out your website. Right now. Take a random page, and see how many times you use we or us. Now count the instances of you. See what I mean?
• Adapt your style. Or rather, styles. When you’re talking to people, one size fits one, so don’t use the same tone for everybody. And if you are addressing a mass audience, imagine yourself talking to one or writing for one. The perfect, ideal, 100% fits-the-profile client. Conjure them up, make them real and address them directly.
• Dig around. Are your audience young or old? Married or living together? Straight or gay, rich or poor, or somewhere in the middle (between rich and poor, I mean)? The more you know, the more you’ll connect with them. Don’t know? Find out. You’ll be glad you did (and so will they).
• Follow the money. Where do your customers hang out? Be there. Blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook. Whatever it takes to find out more, see what they’re saying and adapt your message.

It’s only by defining your target audience – as Visit Britain’s detailed market profiles do – that you can make sure your marketing strikes gold. It’s basic stuff, but all too easily forgotten.

As I discovered a while back, when I took a call from a potential client.

“And who’s your target market?” I asked.

“Target market?” she said, as if I’d asked her the square root of pi. There was a long pause, and much shuffling.

“He wants to know who our target market is,” she said finally to her colleague, her hand muffling the sound as she covered the mouthpiece.

“Target market?” he said. “Hmm.”

More shuffling. And then the line went dead.

Oh dear, I thought. She’s cut herself off. She’ll call back in a minute.

But that was six months ago.

Rude, I hear you say? No, no. I’m sure it’s just cultural. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Find out more:

• Multiculture vulture. Visit Britain’s market profiles will have you winking, smiling and pouring with ease. You’ll find edited highlights at The Guardian and Daily Telegraph.

When you’ve got a problem, what do you do? Brush it under the carpet, or fess up and fix it?

In my software days, I always went for the latter course of action. Not that I’m innately more honest than the next person. It’s [...]]]> Coming clean is always a good idea. Just not too clean…

When you’ve got a problem, what do you do? Brush it under the carpet, or fess up and fix it?

In my software days, I always went for the latter course of action. Not that I’m innately more honest than the next person. It’s just that from experience, I know that one fib leads to another lie, and then another, and then to a great big whopper.

And before you know it, you can’t remember what’s true and what’s not.

So a bug was a bug, not an ‘undocumented feature’. Programs didn’t have ‘stability issues’ – they crashed.

And something didn’t ‘slip through the cracks’. Instead, we simply made a mistake.

“I’ve got an angry customer on the line,” the support people would say to me. “They’re demanding to speak to the product manager.”

So I’d speak to the angry customer, who’d actually turn out to be a frustrated, ignored, spun-to customer. And in minutes, using the simple sword of truth (though a little more truthfully than Jonathan Aitken) I’d have them on-side.

“I’m so sorry,” they’d say, their voice dropping an octave and becoming apologetic and conciliatory. “I know it’s not your fault.” (Actually, it is, I’d be thinking.)

And however bad the truth was, just admitting it would prove enough to defuse the situation.

Like I said, I’m not more honest than the next person.

Just more practical.

Deep pans and thick skins

Honesty pays. Honestly, it does.

Take Domino’s pizza.

They realised that they had a big problem: lots of people didn’t like their pizzas. So instead of keeping it quiet, and working behind the scenes, they decided to go public and show people they were working on a solution.

Their Pizza Turnaround site shows what they’re doing to make things better.

Did we actually face our critics and reinvent our pizza from the crust up? it asks. Oh Yes We Did.

What they’re doing here is really clever, for two reasons:

• They’re admitting they’ve got a problem, and are being completely open about it.
• They’re seen to be doing the right thing.

The second is really crucial. If you’re working on a problem, and nobody knows about it, nobody cares. If they do, they do.

So make sure they know.

But Domino’s pushes the honesty thing ever further: their Pulling the cheese video on Youtube lifts the lid on what really happens during a food photo-shoot (it’s not pretty).

By the time the food stylists – aka the pizza make-up people – have finished, it’s not so much food as a work of art. And like many works of art, it’s entirely artificial.

So by being honest about dishonesty, Domino’s comes out on top.

Clever move.

More or less

The opposite of honest isn’t necessarily dishonest. It’s just less-than-honest.

But it has an effect.

Just look at product recalls.

When supermarkets realise that their tomato purée has shards of glass in it, or that those curling tongs you just bought could set your hair on fire, what do they do?

They put a bland, unbranded, anonymous display advert in the paper with the lot number, expiry date and minimal details of the problem.

In a world saturated by branding, it goes virtually unnoticed. And the result? More people swallow glass and toast their tresses, thanks to the supermarkets’ attempt to minimise brand damage.

Which ironically causes even more brand damage.

How much more refreshing it would be to see a big, bold, branded advert that showed a photograph of the offending product and apologised up-front, with humility and candour.

That approach would create a chain reaction: honesty would lead to understanding, which would lead to trust, which in turn would lead to continued loyalty.

You might call it the Domino Effect.

Rocks in his head

There comes a time, though, when honesty is definitely not the best policy. When it crosses the line into naivety – or even stupidity.

Take Gerald Ratner, eponymous founder of the UK high-street jewellers.

He knew, we knew, everybody knew that Ratners sold cheap-as-chips rocks and rings. Their stuff all looked OK, and that was the main thing. People didn’t pay much, because they didn’t get much.

But nobody said it – until he did.

In a now-famous speech to the Institute of Directors in London in 1991, he blithely declared:

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap”.

But he didn’t stop there. Warming to his theme, he said that some of the earrings they sold were:

“cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.”

The result was immediate, damning and irreversible.

£500m was wiped off the company’s stock-market value. Ratner was forced to resign as chairman, and two years later, the chain dumped the name and rebranded itself the Signet Group.

Ratner earned the nickname The Sultan of Bling, in an echo of the song by the appropriately named Dire Straits.

And the phrase ‘doing a Ratner’ entered the vocabulary of the business world to describe shooting oneself comprehensively in the foot.

So is honesty really the best policy?

Yes it is.

But please, remember poor Gerald. And use it with caution.

Find out more:

• Easy over. Domino’s reinvents itself on pizzaturnaround.com, and blows the gaffe on photo-shoots with Pulling the Cheese on Youtube.
• Diamond geezer. Gerald Ratner blows the (silver-plated) whistle on cut-price bling on Wikipedia.
• And nothing but. Jonathan Aitken brandishes the simple sword of truth, and finds out just how sharp it is.

Except they’re not.

They all take something that’s ‘obvious’ and turn it on its head. They’re about coming at something from a different angle, and solving a problem creatively.

It’s three whole years since I highlighted a funny, compassionate and [...]]]> Getting creative, sending out signals and finding the perfect name

Three unrelated themes this time.

Except they’re not.

They all take something that’s ‘obvious’ and turn it on its head. They’re about coming at something from a different angle, and solving a problem creatively.

1. Brick in the wall

It’s three whole years since I highlighted a funny, compassionate and intelligent presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at TED entitled Do schools kill creativity?

It appealed to my inner rebel – and my outer one too.

And I wasn’t alone. His landmark talk was downloaded over 4 million times, striking a chord with a global audience.

And now he’s back.

His 2010 talk – Bring on the learning revolution! – will make you stop and think about how best to find your niche. His central idea, that ‘education dislocates people from their natural talents’, is a powerful and persuasive one.

He also talks about the ‘tyranny of common sense’, something we hear every day in the business world (‘we’ve always done it that way!’). And why education shouldn’t be linear (because life isn’t).

It’s all there – from Eric Clapton to fast food, from dreaming about being a fireman to why nobody under 25 wears a wristwatch (do you?).

Enjoy.

[If you're reading in email, click here to see the talk on TED.com]

2. Tomayto, tomahto

What’s your company’s tone of voice?

And before you say business-like or professional, think about who you like to do business with. Businesses or people? Faceless and anonymous, or personal and friendly?

Would you like to do business with your company?

I thought about tone of voice again this week when I re-read a blog post from the Wise Old Man of Marketing, Seth Godin.

What sort of accent do you have? starts with the obvious (accent) and extends the idea.

Writing, he says, has an accent. And actions have grammar.

He’s right. Everything we say, everything we do, every interaction we have with people sends out a subtle message.

Don’t know the difference between principle and principal? (Find out.) Think you are sounds more professional than you’re? (Think again.) Don’t have an address on your website? (Include one.) Don’t make it obvious what your prospect should do next? (Change that.) Like to include ‘takes up to 28 days’ to make sure you’re covered on delivery lead times? (Nothing takes a month.)

Everything sends out a signal, whether we like it or not.

So what signals are you sending out?

3. It’s all in a name

Can’t think of a name for your business? Tell me about it.

Actually, don’t. Instead, jump on over to Wordoid.com. And you’ll have a new business name in next to no time.

The idea is simple – you suggest a word to use as the basis (e.g. tech, shop, idea, high, first, micro) and it’ll create a new word for you.

You can choose to put your word at the beginning, middle or end of the new word. And you can choose to make it sound natural, almost natural or (bizarre, but actually kind of funky) hardly natural.

It even checks whether the .com and .net domains are available for the new word. And best of all, it’s free.

Could naming your business get any easier?

Thought not. So what are you waiting for?

Find out more:

• Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson’s original 2006 talk.

Yes, that’s right. Three whole weeks.

But there’s nothing more tedious than a rant about bad customer service, is there? So I’ll spare you the ins and outs of the sorry saga.

Instead, I’ll turn it [...]]]> Living in the slow lane on the information superhighway

My broadband was restored last week, after being down for three weeks.

Yes, that’s right. Three whole weeks.

But there’s nothing more tedious than a rant about bad customer service, is there? So I’ll spare you the ins and outs of the sorry saga.

Instead, I’ll turn it on its head, and tell you what it taught me about service – and about myself.

Service (without a smile)

Good service – whatever it is you do, whatever you sell – really isn’t all that difficult.

But it’s not one big thing – instead, it’s all the little things. And getting those right means having a plan, setting goals and making sure you meet them.

So if I were sharing a skinny latte with the Big Boss of my ISP, what would I tell him (or her)?

• Train your staff. Is there anything more trust-busting than being told by a second support person that the first person you spoke to was ‘new, and may have got it wrong’? Learning on the job is part of the job; learning at the customer’s expense is dangerous and damaging. So train them first, then release them into the wild.
• Tell the truth (even when you’d really rather not). The truth is your secret weapon – even when it’s bad. Hiding an embarrassing truth is worse than telling it with openness and honesty. An open-kimono approach works every time (metaphorically, you understand).
• Get your story straight (and stick to it). Do BT engineers work on Saturday and Sunday? Search me. I was told yes, then no, then maybe. Can support people talk to BT? Yes, then no. Would I get SMS updates? Yes, maybe. But not always. Not really. A simple story has a unique and winning quality – its simplicity.
• Organise your company around the customer. Yes, OK, they work shifts, and they’re sometimes off sick. And what if they get run over by a bus? Or they leave? All these things could happen, but it doesn’t mean teams can’t be organised into cells of 2-3 people who are instantly familiar with specific problems. It  means that customers don’t have to endlessly explain their problems to a new person.
• Use technology. Especially if you’re a technology company. If I can see that my friend Sally is calling on my landline, why can’t they? Better still, why can’t my incoming number fire up their database and bring up my record? And why is the database so slow (I’m just waiting for the record to come up, sir)?
• Don’t pass the buck (even internally). No, it’s not support, it’s accounts. It’s our faults department. It’s BT Wholesale. It’s BT Openreach. It’s the exchange people. It’s the call centre, you see. Your company is a blob, Mr ISP – one big blob that I see as a brand. So make sure that Blob Inc. does its stuff seamlessly.
• Be pleasant, open and helpful – even when the shells are coming in and you want to hunker down in the bunker. Smile even though you’re on the phone. And here’s a thought: listen. Pick up on the signals and ‘mirror’ the language and tone of the speaker (yes, it’s an NLP thing – and it works).
• Communicate. OK, you’re doing stuff, and the problem’s in hand. But does the customer know? If not, why not? Send a quick email, update the support ticket, let them know about that stuff. Manage their expectations, and they’ll never be disappointed.
• Don’t forget the value of existing customers. New customers are expensive and difficult to find. So why alienate existing customers needlessly? Treat them well and they’ll stay forever.
• Don’t wait until people shout – because when they’re shouting, they tend not to listen. And other people hear. Shouting is what I did in the end, when I posted a damning message in my ISP’s discussion forum (it worked).

Warts and all

So what did I learn about myself? Well quite a lot, actually. Living in the slow lane of the information superhighway wasn’t all bad.

My three weeks of subsonic internet access taught me:

• You can’t do two things at once – though super-fast broadband makes you think you can. Multi-tasking is multi-stressing, and being forced to do one thing at a time made me calmer, more focused and more organised.
• Having a backup plan, like a nuclear deterrent, gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. You know it’s there if you need it. In my case, my nuke was my Nokia, which give me reliable, if slow-ish, access to the internet, used as a modem for my PC.
• Don’t get angry at bad service. If you do, you lose twice over. And no, I’m not going to say get even instead. Just accept it for what it is, and if you’ve got a problem, focus on the resolution, not the obstacles along the way.
• Think laterally. When I was dealing with the support team, I was working in a walled garden. Worse, a soundproofed (think Truman Show) walled garden where nobody could hear my screams. When I changed tactics and shouted from the rooftops in a public forum, help materialised as if by magic, and the problem was quickly resolved. Think laterally and you beat the system.
• Take a break – from the online world, that is. Offline really isn’t that bad. You learn to slow down, read more carefully, not flit from one thing to another. You concentrate better, feel more centred and don’t feel as frazzled at the end of the day. Since my broadband came back, my browsing habits have changed. I spend less time online, and get more out of my day.

So bad service wasn’t all bad. Even forcing myself to see the positive in a very negative situation (which goes against the grain in a serial moaner, I can tell you) changed how I see things.

I even discovered that with a Starbucks card, you get free wifi. So now I’ve got another reason to go for a grande skinny decaf extra-hot wet latte.

As if I needed one.

Find out more:

• Butterfly mind. Are Twitter and Facebook affecting how we think? at the Daily Telegraph.
• Wifi with wings. Get yourself a Starbucks card and you can surf while you sip.

I just sent a PDF by email to a client. It’s password-protected – not by me, but by the person who sent it to me – and I told her so.

It’s password-protected, I wrote. Here’s [...]]]> In an age of too much information, be careful what you ask for (you might just not get it).

I just sent a PDF by email to a client. It’s password-protected – not by me, but by the person who sent it to me – and I told her so.

It’s password-protected, I wrote. Here’s the password, I wrote. It’s case-sensitive, I wrote.

A couple of minutes later, back came the reply.

It looks like it’s password-protected, she wrote. Could you let me have the password?

Sound familiar?

I’ll bet it does. In our always-on, 24×7, welcome-to-the-machine world, it’s easy to feel swamped by the deluge of data.

So we find ways around it.

I’m no exception. I’m just as guilty as anybody of skimming, scanning and hopping from one headline to the next.

But how else can you cope with the onslaught of information?

More importantly, how can you help your prospects and customers cope? Because it’s not just about helping them deal with information overload.

It’s about helping you make the sale, get the call, find a lead or receive an enquiry.

Here’s looking at you

OK, time to get our priorities right. You first.

And for a very good reason – because if you can’t see the wood for the trees, the message you get out to your target audience will be muddled, confusing and frustrating.

So how do you focus on what’s important?

Easy – cut down the distractions.

• Do one thing at a time. What happens to you when you’re overloaded? Personally, my pulse increases, I feel like I’ve had too much caffeine, and I get a strange tingling feeling in my arms and legs. If I start dumping the ballast (Skype, reading the news online, checking social networking sites) and do just one thing, I can feel my mojo returning and my karma heave a sigh of relief. You will too.
• Go offline. This is a really scary one, I know. And if you’re anything like me, you can’t trust yourself to really, really go offline. Luckily, help is at hand. Freedom is a devilishly clever little program that disables your internet connection for up to eight hours at a time. The only way you can close the program is by rebooting – which is enough of a disincentive to all except the most recalcitrant.
• Speed read. No, no, I’m not suggesting you plough through a Buzan book or fork out a fortune on a course. Just adopt one simple technique. It’s something I learned a few years back when I wrote copy for a speed-reading guru. Everything else I’ve forgotten, but this one simple tip has stuck: read the first sentence of every paragraph. Nothing else, just the first sentence. You’ll pick up the gist without reading the bits in between. It’s simple but smile-crackingly effective.

And that’s it? I hear you say.

Well yes, it is.

Because if I listed my 50 Top Tips for increasing productivity and getting more done, you’d work out a 51st one – skip them.

So there.

Now what about your customers and prospects?

Slowly, slowly, catchy…

You’re overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t get through to them.

You simply have to think ahead – and more importantly, think like them.

• Make it easy. I skim, you skim, he skims, she skims. Face it – we all skim, so make it easy for people to do it. Break up your copy with bold, bullets, headings and colours. Vary the font size, but don’t go too wild (here’s a tip: use three point sizes maximum, and multiples of two e.g. 10pt, 12pt, 14pt).
• One (idea) at a time. Divide your ideas up into paragraphs. Cut down the paragraphs, so they don’t look so daunting. Make sure each paragraph passes the ‘read only the first line’ test (yes, it’s a game two can play).
• Summarise before, summarise after. Don’t launch into the detail straightaway. First, give a summary – but not an executive summary, or at least, don’t call it that (nothing sends a shiver up the spine quite like those two fatal words). So it’s an overview. Then, follow with the detail, and at the end, wrap up with the main points. So your prospects have three opportunities to pick up your message.
• Don’t give too many choices. I’ve just been looking at broadband offerings. I’m having trouble with my current ISP (more about that sorry saga in another post) and I’m thinking of switching, after seven years of loyalty. But is the competition making it easy? No chance. Especially BT – there’s Anytime This, Total That, the Everything Package, the Almost-But-Not-Quite-Everything Package. Evenings and Weekends, free this, unlimited that. So which one did I go for? None of them, of course. I decided simply to cut and run.
• Make it obvious. How often have you read through copy and thought, yes, yes, all very well, but what do I do next? If your time is short, so is theirs – so don’t waste it. Get to the point fast, and show them what to do next. Allow for impatient readers, and impulse buyers. Have a clear, simple, easy call to action.
• Communicate often enough, but not too often. It’s a delicate balancing act, and it’s important to get it right. Let them know you’re out there, but don’t be a corporate stalker.

Meanwhile, back at the copy ranch, I got an embarrassed email from my client.

I must stop skim-reading, she wrote.

No, I thought, you mustn’t.

You’ve just got to start doing it properly.

Find out more:

• Nothing left to lose. Freedom’s more than just another word – it’s a way of life. And it’s available for Mac & Windows here. As used by Dave Eggers (and Rachel).