Tebay Services

Originally uploaded by lenivor

Living in Manchester now, and with my mum and dad (and Connie’s granny and granddad) up in Edinburgh, we’re finding ourselves up and down the northern stretch of the M6 a lot more than we used to be.

Today, returning from a weekend up north we stopped at Tebay services.

I don’t know why we hadn’t before – Sarah said it was probably because we always see the sign for more services up ahead and ‘keep going a bit longer’. Still, today we stopped and I’m so glad we did.

What a find – a total break from the usually atrocious British motorway services experience. Even with the proliferation of Costas and M&S branches in the last few years, stopping on the motorway is always a spectacularly depressing experience. But Tebay is something a bit different.

Family-owned and set in a beautiful Cumbrian countryside, it’s a really uplifting place to stop and rest.

Almost everything in the cafe and restaurant is home-made and fresh. I had a lovely hot pot for £3.50 which was made with beautiful locally grown lamb. My daughter – a fussy eater usually – wolfed up probably about half of it.

There’s a really nice farm shop with lots of those lovely speciality goods you don’t normally find in shops. It was really well-designed for kids. And the toilets had those neato Dyson dryers in them.

Normally you can’t wait to get out of these places. We were there for well over an hour and drove off feeling refreshed and with that lovely ‘wow’ factor. Which for a service station is the last thing you expect.

It made me think: if there’s a way of doing service stations differently, in a way that seeks to surprise and delight customers, there’s a way of doing anything that way.

I want to be involved with creating things that people love, that they look forward to going and doing again… hey, that they want to blog about. Don’t we all?

The title of this article “Opinion: Loyalty is more than points programs” on retailcustomerexperience.com is spot on. When you read it though, it talks an awful lot about free and fast delivery being the distinguishing experiences for Amazon Prime and Zappos.

What earns Zappos rave reviews and WOM is the way it consistently surprises customers with free shipping upgrades so their shoes arrive sooner than expected. Our work with women shows that shoes are one the fastest ways to her heart, and this approach to delighting customers clearly pays Zappos dividends in the form of 75 percent of purchases come from returning customers, and repeat customers order more than 2.5 times every 12 months. Repeat customers also have higher average order sizes, and year-over-year revenue increased 30 percent.

These are good results for sure. My question though, is shipping always the key loyalty driver? What are other ways that online retailers (or any retailer for that matter) can innovate?

I went to grandly named Battle of Big Thinking yesterday in London. I particularly liked the presentation by Ian Armstrong (Honda), who’s knowledge of the human brain would have put many surgeons to shame!

His presentation centred on how the human brain reacts to brand experiences. Brains apparently are designed and programmed to predict the outcome of an event. When an experience exceeds expectations a huge dose of Dopamine is injected into the system, increasing attention levels and giving you that Friday Feeling.

The trick he said was for brands to look to overdeliver in the brand experience rather than overclaim in communications. Overclaiming leads to disappointment (in the product experience itself) and presumably a drop in Dopamine levels.

So…if you can get away with it … underclaim like hell .. and end up with some very satisfied and vocal customers!

Sitting eating a Kangaroo Burger at a lovely gastro pub called Elstead Mill on Saturday I started thinking about the tricks Pubs get up to, to create word of mouth and build custom. Most pubs lay on music or put on a weekly quiz, but a few really build character into what they do. I remember a village pub near Norwich that adopted a lamb each year. The thing used to wonder around the pub as you ate your Sunday lunch, to crys of aah and then a shout of Oh as it had a pee next to somebody’s table. The pub was always full! 

Which takes me back to my Kangaroo burger … lovely strong flavour, not too tough…well worth telling a few friends about!

According to PR Week, Gordon Brown has turned to advocacy to support his flagging ratings. Each week he is picking up the phone to answer questions raised to him in letters by the public, directly. The big question is who’s intention would your trust most …. an unannounced call from the PM or a call from your local Double Glazing company? Whatever the answer, a call from the PM is sure to fuel dinner party conversations around the country and in doing just that, maybe it achieves its aims.

Little touches make all the difference! Phoned up my favourite internet bank yesterday to pay a few bills and the first thing they said to me was “Happy Birthday Mr Moss”.  Nice little touch that I’ve told a few people about since.

A speech by Seth Godin (made some time ago) that I came across today. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth watching.

The point he makes is that successful marketing comes down to successful idea spreading. Those brands who can spread an idea further – win. At the heart of the ‘idea-spreading’ model has been mass media. That model is now broken – consumers are ignoring mass media. The future is about making products remarkable – getting people to talk about and become advocates of the product. Spot on …

I had a fascinating tour of Speakeasy Bars this weekend in New York as part of a quick business trip to the city last week.
Most of us are aware of the history of the Speakeasy – the secret drinking establishments that popped up during prohibition in the 1920’s. I certainly wasn’t aware of their latest reincarnation - as hidden bars around New York, that you find out about largely through word of mouth. They look like nothing from the outside, but inside offer some of the coolest drinking venues in the city. One bar I visited called the Back Room, insisted that you drink their cocktails out of china cups …an interesting sight on a Saturday night in NY!
The experience reminded me of the power of wom. Not only to spread the word effectively (these places were packed) but also to provide real credibility to the message. Put simply, these places are cool because you discover them through talking to your cool friends - not through commercial flyers or classified ads.

What is Brand Advocacy? I read a case study this weekend in Contagious Magazine that provides an answer.
Method is a company that produces a range of cleaning products. Launched in 1999 in the US, it will have revenues in 2007 of around $100m.
It was launched with a clear vision. It’s aim was to take cleaning products from under the sink and make cleaning fun, trendy, non-toxic and importantly part of the home. In summary, to start a fight against all forms of “dirty”.
Method commissioned a designer called Karim Rashid to help shape it’s offering. The result was a range of highly designed, gentle and nice smelling products that surprised and delighted, complimented any home and started to create an army of advocates for the brand - stage one of any Brand Advocacy approach.

Stage two was to activate these advocates. Marketing started with the  5th P of Marketing the Parent or Corporate brand. The founders of the company describe themselves as “the first people against dirty” and all employees during the recruitment process, even today, have had to complete homework assignments including answering questions like “what are you going to do to ensure Method continues to receive 1000’s of fan letters”. It’s inside out branding, helps make employees into advocates and is a critical part of any authentic organisation in our new transparent age.
Next, Method built up a community of fan’s (over 5,000 now) who actively help them design products and spread the word through Blogs and “love letters”. Every call the company get’s to customer service team results in that person receiving samples and literature for them and their friends. Initially these callers received free T-Shirts and caps as well.
Method also run regular “Detox” (your home) parties with customers, organised through paid regional co-ordinators and have programmes with key influencers groups such as Parent Teacher Associations and even Fashion Journalists – there’s a first for cleaning products!
Put simply, Method have seen their network of advocates (customers, journalists, staff, experts) as far more important than paid for media. They have done everything possible to mobilise these … to help them spread the word. The result has been tremendous growth for the business and a demonstration of the power of brand advocacy.

This is a  video podcast  I did this week looking at how you build brand advocacy and word of mouth recommendation. Research carried out by my company Weber Shandwick, involving 4,000 people across Europe, has shown that on average 4 in 10 consumers of a brand would class themselves as advocates (promoters) but only 2 in 10 (half of these) say they are actually active i.e talking, writing, blogging about the brand.

With these advocates claiming to be successful in converting potential trialists to purchasers on 50% of occasions, brands are sitting on a huge untapped opportunity. It should be a clear messages to all brand owners …hire a PR agency today and start igniting those conversations.

The Royal Mail’s research (Marketing Week 17th Jan) highlights the growing importance of Social Media as a key platform for brand recommendation. With a fifth of the UK population already active members of social networks and two thirds saying they are likely to buy a brand on the basis of recommendation from a friend, they identify that it is a channel that can’t be ignored by brand owners today.
Of course they are right. It is the transition of brands to the new world that is the challenge.
Seth Godin in his new book Meatball Sundae makes a very important point. “If your product and marketing are optimized for the old model of marketing, you will be defeated by the relentless tide of new marketing and the products and services designed for it”.  In other words, if you see this as something you can simply add to your current marketing and communications planning – you have already got it wrong!
The new advocacy age is reinventing how consumers make decisions on your brand and you need a reinvention strategy also. Research by Weber Shandwick, conducted with Dr Paul Marsden, demonstrated that 70% of brand advocacy (recommendation) can be correlated directly to how much a brand surprises and delights it customers at every touch-point (product, price, promotions and place)!

It’s time for a root and branch review of your brand and how you spend your communications dollars. It’s time to put advocacy at the heart of everything you do.

I recently came across the concept of “Brand Butlers”.  It originates from the knowledge that one of the best ways of surprising and delighting customers and getting them talking, is to assist them in smart relevant ways e.g. Charmin providing free Loos in Times Square, Pampers advising mums in Supermarket car parks about how to properly attach Baby Seats to cars etc.

The term Brand Butlers really sums up how brands need to think in our cluttered and unengaged age - looking for ways to leverage their “assets” in the broadest sense to help customers in unexpected ways. It’s a way to credibly connect with customers, to serve up something meaningful and ignite conversations.