[ Sponsored Links ]

Advertise here »

Fire all your marketing staff – you don’t need them

reply to message » post a new message » e-mail to a friend »
Subject:  Fire all your marketing staff – you don’t need them
Author:   TimLeighton-Boyce:   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   13:19:40 12 May 2006
 
Back at the end of the seventies (so we're definitely  talking Web -15.0 here, but bear with me) I helped turn round a mail order company which had been a byword for "nightmare" within its sector.

We did this by becoming quite obessive about same-day shipping and empowering despatch people to use their initiative and send by first-class letter post if the item wasn't too heavy.

So, at a time when "allow 28 days for delivery" was the norm our stuff started turning up the next day. It was a long time before we even thought about making any claims in magazine adverts, but we noticed some definite effects fairly quickly.

One of those was that people started adopting new channels for placing their orders. They would phone, instead of sending in the magazine order form (1979, remember...). Simply including the order number, as everyone did, had little impact, but teaching by doing and delivering the service worked. Our customers changed their behaviour. The word also got around remarkably quickly. The reaction is one of delight (and still is) when the service is much better than other offerings. Delight is something which people tend to share.

I've repeated the same process several times since for different companies and can assure you it works. The mechanisms for customers spreading the word are also far, far better than they ever were, so the impact of such a campaign is much magnified.

With that in mind, I'd quibble about the subject line. This has always been one of the best methods of marketing there is, and most marketing people know it. It's just a bit of a slog to do and tends to involve touching boxes and hanging out with people who touch boxes.

 

 
« Back to Internet Marketing Forum Previous Thread »
« Back to Internet Marketing Forum Post a new message »
Subscribe for only €299