January 2007 , Number 92

My 2007 New Year’s Marketing Resolution:

(For Other Businesses)

            Last year I tried making a number of New Year’s marketing resolutions. I’ll recap them at the end of this column and you’ll see for yourself how for the most part I didn’t live up to my own high expectations.

            So for this year I’ve decided to give myself a break. I’ve come up with some New Year’s marketing resolutions for other businesses. Now I won’t have to disappoint myself. I can take the high ground and watch other people disappoint me.

            And stick around for my self-assessment of my 2006 resolutions. It will be painful.

            Resolution #1: Upgrade Your Spam!

            I don’t mind opening my e-mail in the morning and seeing 50 or 100 marketing messages. After all, I practice marketing and it’s fun to see what other people are marketing and how they are doing it.

            But the spammers take all the fun out of e-mail.

            First of all, I’m not going to buy the vitamins. I don’t care how many ways they advertise the pills, what great discounts they give me, or what body parts they will firm up. I’m just not interested. So cut out the vitamin ads, spammers. I’m sticking to one-a-day at the local drugstore. My decision is final.

            Also, could you be a little more clever in your lead-ins? With subject lines like “Alfredo wrote” followed by another e-mail with “Tristan wrote” followed by another e-mail with “Verna wrote” do you think you will really get past my spam filter, let alone get me to read the ad? No way. And where did you come up with those weird names?

            When did you start getting so stingy with your monetary promises? I don’t want the $219,000 loan. I don’t want a loan. And only for a couple of hundred thousand? Come off it. I remember the good old days when someone from Nigeria wrote me a three page e-mail promising me millions of dollars for merely helping him get some money out of the country. Now that was promising spam. I never thought I would long for Nigerian spam, but it has come to that.

            So, upgrade your e-mail, spammers. My spam filter needs a new challenge.

            Resolution #2: Let Me Talk to a Human!

            I live in northeastern Vermont. Sometimes, in the winter months (which can span most of the year here), it’s too cold or too icy or too snowy to go outside. So we huddle next to our propane heater and communicate with our computers. Sometimes the computer isn’t quite satisfactory and we want to discuss a problem or a sales question or just have a pleasant little chat with the nice people who sold us the digital picture frame which we bought as a gift and doesn’t work.

            Then, phone call purgatory quickly sets in. To get to a customer service representative often take the patience of Job or the cunning of a fox. Some websites don’t even list a phone number. When they do list a number, you encounter endless electronic messages and commands to press this number and then that number before given a number of options, none of which fit your needs. You used to be able to go directly to a live person by pressing 0, but companies figured out that people were bypassing their elaborate phone network and have eliminated 0 as an option.

            I like the advice of Don Gallegos, who wrote, “Win the Customer, Not the Argument,” about his experiences as CEO of King Soopers supermarkets in Denver. Although Don was in charge of 15,000 people, he often answered the phone himself and insisted on taking any call in which a frustrated customer wanted to talk to the “President.” Don hates automated answering programs. He says a human voice can solve problems. Machines can’t.

            So, all you companies with programs designed to keep customers away from humans, drop the programs.

            It’s too cold up here to go outside and we want to talk to someone!

            Resolution #3: If You Charge for Customer Service, Hire Qualified People

            It used to be that you could buy a piece of software or hardware and receive free support when you needed it.

            No more. Now most companies charge for support. I accept that with the shrinking profit margins on computer products, free service has disappeared along with the free meals the airlines used to serve when business was more profitable.

            But if you are going to charge me, at least know what you are doing.

            Last year I bought a program called “Parallels” for my Macintosh computer. Now that Macintosh uses Intel chips, it is capable of running Windows programs much more easily. Parallels is a great idea, putting a Windows machine inside your Macintosh so you can run Windows programs at the same time as you run your Macintosh programs and share files between the two operating systems.

            My problem was that the online manual for Parallels was very skimpy and they had no live customer support (Help! I want to talk to a human). I paid for technical support and got someone in India who hadn’t worked very long with Macintoshes and read from a script. That person couldn’t help me at all.

            I then paid for tech support from Microsoft and found someone who didn’t know what Parallels was. Apple tech support was similarly unhelpful.

            Finally, in utter frustration, I scoured the Internet chat rooms and found a lot of free advice that eventually worked. I love the program now. I just wish it hadn’t been such a project to make it work.

            I’ll pay for advice. Just hire the people in the chat rooms who know how your product works.

            OK, so much for telling other people what to do. Here are my resolutions from last year and how I fared.

            1. Market more on the Internet: I tried Google and Yahoo to market our books with very little success. Selling them on Amazon and our own website works out much better. I’ll give myself a C+ on this for trying.

            2.  Make our website more customer friendly and change the content more often:

We changed Internet providers and totally redid our book sales section. We don’t change the content often enough. Another C+.

            3. Learn to change the website myself: I did learn enough of Dreamweaver to make a lot of changes, although I still can’t make major changes on the site without help. I really tried to do this, so B+.

            4. Practice what I preach and send more postcards: We did a few mailings but not enough. C-.

            5. Create a brochure about our new company: You can guess what happened. F.

            6. Be more loyal to our customers: I try, but I don’t do a good enough job with this. D.

            7. Make a timeline and an advertising budget: Oops! F.

            8. Use the four-mula for success: I try to keep in touch with people, but not enough. C-.

            9. Have fun with our marketing: We’ve tried to do that.B.

            10. Have more people on our e-mail list. We’ve made some progress, but not enough. C.

            Well, you can see why I didn’t make marketing resolutions for myself this year! I wish other marketers better success with the ones I made for them.