Customer Experience – Treat Me Like Your Mother-in-Law

by Peter Sorgenfrei

The car buying experience has always been on the top ten list of the things people fear the most.  Consumers fear walking onto a dealer lot, being attacked by the first salesman to spot them, and then coerced into considering a vehicle in a different color, with a different trim level and at a different price (higher) than what they set out to buy.

Then comes the whole song and dance with the F&I manager and the dealership principal to ‘approve’ the terms offered after the consumer has been sitting in the chair for hours, hungry, tired on on the verge of leaving.  Far from a pleasurable experience.

Brands like Saturn and Scion entered the scene with no haggle pricing and the purchase experience got a little better for buyers of those brands but the one-price philosophy did not bleed over to other stores.  For the majority of the buying public, the dealer experience ranks right below getting a root canal.  At least there is anesthesia at the dentist!

The car buying experience should be one of the things in the auto industry that is the simplest to fix. It does not involve complex engineering, logistical challenges, supplier failure, etc. It is about human interaction and treating people they way we want to be treated.

Recently I told a sales team that they should imagine they were selling vehicles to their mother-in-law.

My basis for that analogy was that we treat our mother-in-law with more respect than our own mother (we get away with more with her), we do not completely dumb it down, cause we want her to like us, and we certainly do not pressure her to do anything she is does not want, of fear of retribution and wrath. (Just kidding Fran!)

But seriously, if car salesmen (and women) treated all their customers like their mother-in-law, I believe more and better relationships would be formed and more repeat (and less expensive) business would occur.

Next time you are shopping for a car, if the salesman is pressuring you, ask him to imagine you are the mother-in-law, after he stops looking dumbfounded, tell him about this theory and I bet your experience will be better.

Filed under: Automotive, Customer Service , Automotive, Cars, Consumers, Customer Service, ideas, Psychology, Retail

Crowdfunding forests

“Forget Wall Street, invest in interdependence” is the message from Driftless Farm founders. Thought to be one of the first examples of a community supported forest, Driftless Farm in Stoddard, WI uses a crowdfunding model to ensure the sustainability of its 140-acre forest. Members pay an annual fee of $550 dollars and in return are granted access to designated resources, events and workshops and have the opportunity to forge their own unique role within the forest. They also have unlimited access to the forest itself, where they can hike, camp, explore, scavenge firewood or simply sit back and enjoy the scenery.

Driftless Farm was launched a few months ago by Whole Trees Architecture and Construction, and already has four of its twenty memberships taken.

Forest owners often see their land as a tax burden and therefore have little economic incentive to keep it as a forest. Instead, more financial benefit can be found by clearing the land and using it for grazing or development. However, the global climate crisis is calling out for us to use our resources more wisely and to nurture and replenish our forests. So with its foundations in sustainability, let’s hope that Drifless Farm is the first of many Community Supported Forests to come.

Check out their website

Filed under: Crowdsourcing , Consciousness, Consumers, ideas

Commentary on wsj.com about air travel: charge for total weight

This article prompted a fair amount of commentary about the travails of air travel. One in particular caught our attention:

Charge passengers a fare that is based on the sum of their weight as well as the weight of their luggage:
Fare = $/lb. x (passenger weight + luggage weight)

Why should my 100 lb wife have to pay extra for taking 25 lbs of luggage while the 250 lb person who checks no luggage have no extra fee. In effect, the light are subsidizing the heavy. — Adam Brenner

We hope to hear from our airlines friends and clients on why that may or may not work – besides the obvious that charging based on a human condition probably is not PC.

Filed under: Information, Market Research , Airlines, Consumers, ideas, Obesity, Travel

Free rental cars for flexible travelers

Rental companies often need to move cars from a to b and it’s safe to say that universally, people like free “anything”. This is where Transfercar steps in. The New Zealand company works with the car rental industry, posting lists of cars which they need transporting from a to b. Drivers can either check the website for availability, or enter preferential journeys and be notified by text when cars become available.

Although all journeys begin and end at a rental company’s specified location, the lure of free rental, often with free insurance, free ferry and sometimes even free fuel is enough to attract money savvy travelers to venture slightly off their planned routes.

The idea was born when Espen, one of the founders was working part time at Ace Rentals. He began to notice a trend in large amounts of money being spent on relocation of cars from one branch to another.

Transfercar are currently in the process of raising capital to expand their operation in Australia and the USA. Let’s hope they’re successful.

Check out their site

Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Automotive, Consumers, ideas, Innovation, Lifestyle, Rental Car, Travel

More creative shops creating their own product rather than tout clients’ offering

With major advertisers cutting costs, creative shops are increasingly commercializing their own product ideas.

When Coca-Cola acquired Vitaminwater for $4.1 billion in 2007, it wasn’t for the breakthrough electrolyte-drink technology. It paid for breakthrough marketing, and that epiphany rippled through Adland. Why shouldn’t agencies launch their own brands rather than solely focus on other people’s prodcts? Consultancy PSFK recently invited FAST COMPANY writer Danielle Sacks to moderate a panel featuring four creative chiefs running what PSFK calls New Idea Agencies. In this edited transcript of the conversation, they explore what it’s like for ad people to go beyond branding into the messy world of product creation. Will what they learn improve advertising for the rest of us?

Full Article

Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Advertising, Clients, Consumers, Design, ideas, Innovation, Marketing

Quotes in BusinessWeek

Peter Sorgenfrei was quoted in this BusinessWeek column by Ben Kunz:

Viralsourcing: Let Crowds Create Your Ad Message – Not only are fans spreading the word about products—they’re now helping to design and build marketing campaigns from the get-go.

Full Article

Filed under: Marketing , Advertising, Consumer, Crowdbands, Entertainment, ideas, Marketing, Music, Network, Online

Apple granted patent for sports sensors

Think Major League Baseball’s stats and live video iPhone app is cool? Imagine what Apple could do with technology it was granted a patent for this week: a network of sensors that deliver real-time velocity, impact, rotation and other data from sporting event participants to the web. Imagine your iPhone’s accelerometer placed inside a boxer’s glove, a snowboarder’s snow suit or a NASCAR driver’s car – with the information captured delivered to your iPhone or Apple TV while you watch the competition either in person or remotely.

Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything – but this one is very cool.

More

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Future, Gadgets, ideas, Innovation, iphone, Mobile, Technology

The future of the web is small

Something you should read:

On Ideasonideas.com Eric Karjaluoto writes:

I have a theory. It could prove incorrect or even shortsighted, nevertheless, it’s a bet I’m willing to make. I think businesses on the web are going to get a lot smaller. In the web world, we’re currently experiencing the fallout of the second of two tidal waves. The next one, however, will be slower, more distributed, and come with far less of a shock.

Panning for gold
The last two surges have been exciting at times and harrowing at others. I’d characterize it as largely bulimic, contrasting ridiculous excesses against severe slashing. The most recent web gold-rush perhaps didn’t seem as profoundly exaggerated as the first, but it was still founded on the notion of endless wealth and massive payouts. Hence, many people started small companies in their garages with hopes that their operations would gain traction and ultimately be purchased by the one of the big guys.

Full article

Filed under: Information, Innovation, Networks , ideas, Innovation, Internet

Super-Influencers and Memes: Useful Explanations or Vodoo?

This long and interesting post from the Neuroanthropology blog showed up on one of my friend’s shared RSS feeds recently. Essentially, the post eviscerates several talks on memes at the recent TED conference, demonstrating how inappropriate it is to ascribe evolutionary mechanisms to ideas (memes). Although we love us some Dennett around here, I must say Greg Downey’s criticism that there’s little empirical basis for using memes to explain human behavior and social development is hard to dispute.

Outside the world of academia, others are beginning to doubt the related “super-influencers” explanation of how trends spread and products become popular. In this model, super-influencers are more fit “hosts” that allow memes to propagate further and faster than than the same ideas would through “regular” people. It’s sort of a disease-vector model of marketing success and failure.

And this model has made sense from a marketing point of view for a while now as it seems to explain in part why some products and trends catch on while others don’t. But just as there’s little falsifiable evidence for memes, it would seem that there is equally little evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of marketing to super-influencers. Which is not to say that super-influencers and memes aren’t useful metaphors for how preferences and ideas spread – it’s just that we have to recognize the limits of these models. That’s kind of a shame: they were neat models.

Filed under: Marketing, Networks, Science , cognition, ideas, Marketing, memes, super-influencers