January 30, 2005
on the treatment of fans
Personally, Dave, I’m very sorry. You have an awesome site. I greatly appreciate what you’ve done for Microsoft and our customers. We really need to treat our fan sites better than this. I don’t care what the content was, we should call first and work on relationships with our fans first.
Great marketing advice. Look after your fans first. It’s so simple it hurts.
Of course, I can hear the naysayers kvetching, “That works if you have something like Microsoft or Mercedes. But what if it’s more prosaic, like toilet paper or shaving cream?”
Well, having been sent, aged 10, to a Scottish boarding school where they didn’t believe in soft & fluffy toilet paper, where they believed instead in hard, crinkly, Army Surplus toilet paper, I can truthfully say that soft & fluffy toilet paper fans do exist. Thank god for Proctor & Gamble, is all I can say.
And I’m a big fan of Noxema shaving cream.
Other prosaic faves of mine:
Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. Utterly love them.
Diet Coke. Six cans a day, minimum.
Yorkshire Tea. Would be lost without it.
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Fabulous.
Gillette Mach 3 Razor. It’s made shaving SO MUCH easier. Really.
Head & Shoulders. Love that freaky blue color.
Of course I don’t expect Noxema or Kellogg’s to start paying me the same kind of attention Mercedes pays their customers. That would be unprofitable, not to mention rather spooky and weird.
But even with small, low-interest products, you can tell whether the maker cares about your business or not, whether he cares about the customer or not. The way it’s presented. The way it’s designed. The way its “voice” expresses itself. The way it’s not crap. The way the price doesn’t seem to be excessive. The way the packaging communicates self-worth.
Cheap or expensive, brands that “get it” give out a lot of cues. They give off certain vibes. And it can’t be faked.
The Gillette Mach 3 gets it, as much as any Apple Macintosh.
Yorkshire Tea gets it, as much as any bottle of Moet & Chandon.
Sure, it all scales differently in the market, but the passion at the center is the same.
Which is why Proctor & Gamble is such a great company. They make toilet paper with more passion than most artists make paintings.
If your product “gets it”, it’s going to have fans, I don’t care how “prosaic” it is. Find out who they are and look after them first.
[SEE ALSO:] “MarkLove
I don’t buy Kelloggs products after hearing on our (New Zealand’s) radio that they were trying to get our food regulations changed so they could import a particular product here. (May have been one of their cornflakes.)
I don’t know if they succeeded, but they should not have been trying, so no money from me to them.
Marketing’s fine, but some of it’s there to mask a reality the sellers don’t want the buyers to know about.
Agreed, Carl.
Sometimes life’s like that, whether you’re a single person or a large, international brand.
Sometimes you have to play hardball
My days of “Ordinary People Good, International Companies Bad” are long gone…
Hugh, I dunno if you’ve gotten a chance to flip through that lovemarks book yet, but the first 2/3 of it, where Roberts describes what a “lovemark” is, pretty much echoes most of what you’re saying here (emphasis on “most”). If my memory serves me correctly, he said the same thing about Head and Shoulders.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, because the important part — the part lovemarkers and the anti-lovemarkers diverge — is in what companies should do about it.
D’accord, Jack
Hugh MacLeod: P&G Makes TP With a Passion
Hugh insightfully says: … Even with small, low-interest products, you can tell whether the maker cares about your business or not, whether he cares about the customer or not. The way it’s presented. The way it’s designed. The way its…
Hugh — you’re right about passion and P&G… it’s amazing how excited you can get about selling cleaning products or laundry detergent. Just wanted to let you know there’s someone on the inside who is hearing your “Smarter Conversations” conversation loud and clear. Keep up the great work!
6 cans of diet coke a day? You’ve got a serious addiction there.
DO YOU HAVE A HUGE PENIS? WE HAVE HUGE PENISES TOO! BUY OUR RAZOR! I want to hear “hurts a lot fucking less” before I buy.
Now I feel like I’ve missed a rung on the ladder somewhere, because I had hoped that in a post-Cluetrain/Hughtrain world, David Beckham would make a lot less money.
You’re beginning to sound like Kevin Roberts!!
Jeez, Tony, I know. Maybe I should change my header:
“gapingvoid. an ideas weblog.”
Have any of the Lovemarks ever said they are sorry?
Apple, for instance, is a lovemark (it’s in the book) but they sued their fans multiple times.
Us? Our lawyers get out of control and I apologize and clean up the mess.
Why? Because I am on the Hughtrain!
Or trying to be, anyway.
I wouldn’t worry about “trying”, Robert… I’d say your streaks ahead of me, anyway.
Tony Goodson said a GREAT thing about Lovemarks here:
http://tonygoodson.typepad.com/tonygoodson/2004/11/cluetrain_ours_.html
“Cluetrain smells right and feels like ours. LoveMarks doesn’t…”
Beautiful.
The Mach3T Power surpasses the standard Mach 3 or Mach 3 Turbo.
Bit off topic, but still a useful FYI. I think.
K-Tel Nose Hair Trimmer. Never thought I’d need it, but now that I am getting old, suddenly all this hair appears in weird places, and you need like specialised intstruments to get rid of it. I guess all of human life is there. You start out as a golden youth ridiculing it, and then you find out you need it, and go through a phase of horrid alienation, before settling into middle aged contentment that anyone thought of it.
Now remember, 75% of the global spend in first world countries is controlled by women, mainly, with a significant slice controlled by men over 50ish.
I think that people targetted in the current advertising, are ironically the people that are the least economically attractive. However, adverts in Saga don’t win creative awards.