Starbucks, pt. II

Well, I promised you all an update on the customer service debacle at Starbucks at the beginning of April. It took them about 1 week (just not good enough) to respond to my email and about 85% was standard copy & paste stuff. The interesting thing, though, was that they said it was not their policy that you couldn't buy sandwiches to take home with you, just that frontline staff should be told to tell customers that the taste might not be as good as when it had been freshly prepared in-store. In many ways, this just annoys me even more. My customer service experience was based on a rigid in-store policy, which meant that I couldn't get anything to eat and leading to my annoyance on a focus of policies over customers. Now it turns out that they were following a corporate policy that doesn't even exist. I wonder if this is because the training manual is so big that the managers just can't keep up with all of the policies, or whether the manager of the store on Oxford Street couldn't actually be bothered to read the thing. Unfortunately, it all lead to the same result = 1 very annoyed customer.

Le Guide Rouge - The Red Michelin Guide for France 2008

Those of my readers who know me well also know that I'm a huge foodie. Having grown up in a home with a management guru (and glutton) for a father and a superstar chef (and talented artist) disguised as my mother, I picked up an interest in good food at a very early age.

When I left home to go to university (Copenhagen Business School all the way back in 1992), I didn't want to follow the lead of some of my classmates who ate Danish open-faced sandwiches - smørrebrød - 6 nights a week and went to the girlfriend's parents once a week, I knew that I had to learn to cook proper meals, and learn it fast.

Without blowing my own trumpet too much, I would say that with the help of some foodie friends (Maggie and Clifford, thank you) I have, over the years, become a rather skilled chef who can easily pull of a full 5 course menu for guests at a dinner party. However, there is nothing I enjoy more than just some simple Italian homestyle cooking, where everything can just be served on huge platters and the wonderful quality of the ingredients, rather than the chef's technique, become the centre of attention.

However, this post isn't really about my skills in the kitchen, but rather my experiences as a gourmand which were started on a slippery slope one night at Le Gavroche in London, when I was no more than 12 years old. Ever since then, I've enjoyed the spectacle of going to a truly great restaurant. Sensing the care that the chef has put into the food; relaxing into the ambiance of the place; and appreciating attentive, but unobtrusive, service.

In the last 20 years, I've been in the enviable position of having had several great experiences at restaurants over the world, and even though I do not slavically follow the red Michelin guide I believe that it can sometimes give you some valuable pointers with regards to the quality of a place. Having said that I don't necessarily believe that you would find "value for money" in a 3 star establishment, particularly in France where you can easily find yourself paying up to 280 Euros or more for a tasting menu. That's just plain ridiculous, in my humble opinion. What the Guide Rouge is good for is giving you a tantalising insight into the best places to go for a very good meal when you go on a French road trip as I will be doing this Summer. I've been tasked with booking a restaurant in Reims for a nice dinner for two and I'm sure that the Guide Rouge will come in handy for that.

That is why I was so happy to find Chez Pim's blog, where I could download a great PDF file giving you an overview of all of the restaurants with stars in France as well as the Bib Gourmands (value for money with great meals for less than 28 Euros in the countryside and less than 35 Euros in Paris). It also shows which restaurants are on the rise (well worth going to them now, rather than when they attain three stars and prices go through the roof). Rather than list the towns alphabetically like the book version of the Le Guide Rouge France 2008: Hotels Et Restaurants does, the PDF file allows you to look by category and then see a list of towns and establishments in alphabetical order.

So if you're going to France and fancy some good food, you have a number of options highlighted below.

OPTIONS:

1. You can download the PDF file here
2. Visit the Chez Pim blog here
3. Buy the new Guide Rouge to France at Amazon

Big brands still just don't get viral marketing!

General Motors in Canada (and their bloody web site doesn't even resolve - you get a 404 Error page trying to enter into the front page - absolutely classic!) have completely lost their marbles - probably a natural extension of losing their complete corporate strategy from Detroit in the last 25 years.

An article appeared today on the Canadian IT Business web site describing a successful viral marketing campaign centered around a scavenger hunt in several Canadian cities to promote the new Pontiac Vibe. It is similar to the Nokia Game scavenger hunts we saw across Europe at the beginning of the millennium and the idea was that the teams would get their assignments each day at 9 a.m. and would then have to use their Blackberry Pearl 8130 smart phones to search for clues.

Even the moronic journalists have been completely hoodwinked by this:
"This is really different. There are absolutely no GM personnel in the event and you can't find any ad in the papers about the race," said Chris Chase, an Ottawa-based automotive journalist for CanadianDriver, an online car magazine.

Everybody seems to be happy as there are "videos out there in the Net showing us doing crazy things like blow drying our hair in public and selling street meat in Yorkville."

So how much does it cost to set up a Scavenger hunt like this - even without media spend? A good guess would be a minimum of $50,000 CDN. Naturally this isn't a lot of money for a big car manufacturer promoting a high involvement product, but let's get real here and look at the fantastic response that the so-called viral campaign has received. So far the campaign site, which launched on March 24th, 2008 has attracted... WAIT FOR IT... "more than 4,000 unique visitors."

At that point I just fell off the chair laughing. So far we're looking at a cost of probably around $12.50 per visitor. Since more than 2,000 have also signed up as "team supporters" it is safe to assume that most of them are either GM employees or friends and family of the journalist racing team drivers. That leaves us with about 2,000 real visitors to the site - at a cost of $25 each. Let us assume that they can convert 0.2% of these people into buying the car - after having to take various write-offs as a result of test drives. That means that 4 people will actually end up buying a car priced at $15,995. Let us for a moment assume that the profit margins are around 6%, which, according to my knowledge of the car industry, is a fair assumption. This means that GM currently stand to make a net profit from the campaign of $960 x 4 = $3,840.

Oh, let's just realise the costs again... net profit = -$46,160.

In order to break even they need more than 12 times as much traffic and to ensure that their conversion rates are at least 0.2% - and who knows how many of these people were going to buy the car anyway?

This unfortunately is yet another example of brands completely misunderstanding the power and the uses of viral marketing, but since it's GM I can't say that I'm surprised after the entire Chevrolet Tahoe debacle.

Read the article from IT Business here.
See the awful Catch the Vibe campaign site here.

Unfortunately this is a bad confluence of a crap idea, lousy execution and a marketing executive who doesn't know his a*se from his elbow. Way to go, GM!

Bad logos, part IV

No more I promise you. I'm so fed up with looking at bad logos that I promise (as I mentioned in my previous post) that this will be the last batch of bad logos you'll get to see for some time.

So let's get this over and done with.

1. Next Computer
Probably designed by Steve Jobs himself. Reputedly he was also responsible for the original Apple logo with Isaac Newton sitting under the tree. Rather poor track record, but loved what you've done with re-inventing Apple and everything to do with the iPod, iTunes, AppleTV etc.


2. Norfolk Admirals
What the f...?

3. Visit Milwaukee
No, I still don't want to visit Milwaukee. Using the architecture of a second rate art museum in your tourism logo won't do anything to change that.

4. Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
Having lived in Vancouver, I pride myself on knowing the locals and their mindset quite well. Unfortunately, it's incredibly sad to see the completely misplaced communal guilt with regards to treatment of the natives/First Nation inhabitants. This also means that everything to do with local identity shown to the outside world has to be "native" art. It doesn't make any difference any longer. It's a bit like Germans saying that we're sorry about the Nazis so let's try and create new positive connotations linked to the swastika. Look at it from the positive side, my Canucklehead friends - even if it is almost dadaistic at least it is a hell of a lot better than the crap that LOCOG came up with for the 2012 London Olympics.

Bad logos, part III

And here is another dose of truly awful logos. I know that some of them might have seemed a good idea at the time and were very progressive, but they all look dated and horrible today. The surprising thing is that some of them are still in use.

1. Old Microsoft Logo

2. ESPN

3. NASCAR
In many ways this might actually be quite good as it makes me think of "Duelling Banjos" (the theme song from Deliverance) and rednecks - which reminds me of NASCAR's target audience, which tends to come from the lower socio-economic groupings.


4. British Leyland
Low budget cars, low budget logo

Tomorrow I will upload the 4th and final batch of bad logos.

Bad logos, pt. II

Some more crap logos for your delectation as promised:

1. Instituto de Estudos Orientais
2. Republican National Convention 2008
Why did the elephant cross the road?
3. Al-Rajhi Bank
Don't tell me that you aren't thinking the same thing...
4. Southwest Airlines
This logo makes EasyJet look classy...
More bad logos to follow soon...

Starbucks choose systems and policies over customers

This is a post about the second weird experience I had this evening (as promised). I spent the evening at the First Tuesday event in Soho, meeting some interesting people and listening to some inspiring presentations from Google and Lovefilm among others.

By the time I left it was already 9:30 p.m. and I was feeling slightly hungry. As I made my way to the tube station at Tottenham Court Rd. I was pleasantly surprised to find a Starbucks open and they had a full selection of sandwiches and paninis on display. I thought that I'd just grab a quick steak and cheese panini, which I'd be able to heat up when I came home. As I reached the cash register the cashier took my sandwich to warm it, when I informed him that I didn't want it heated as it would be soggy by the time I got home and that I would heat it at home. His colleague then told me that they couldn't sell me the sandwich because it had to be refrigerated and they didn't know when I would be home. Staring at them in disbelief, I explained that I wanted a hot sandwich and not a cold soggy one. I was informed that it was a management decision that they couldn't sell a cold panini. I left the shop vowing that I would tell my faithful blog readers about this.

Has it really come to this? Are retailers in the UK now as afraid as their US counterparts of being sued at every single opportunity? Why don't they just go all out and ask all customers to sign a disclaimer before buying a cup of coffee, a sandwich or something else stating that they will not sue Starbucks if the burn themselves, get food poisoning or whatever. Maybe they should also start employing security guards, have metal scanners and iris and/or fingerprint recognition... The key to any good customer service experience is that the rules should be in place - but also that the person on the front line dealing with the customer should be able to use their own judgment in resolving any complaint/issue the customer might have. Tonight that was definitely not the case and I will be giving Starbucks a wide berth in the future unless they adopt some kind of common sense in their dealings with customers.

What's really annoying about this entire thing is that I'm sure I'm not the first person to experience this. Why else would it be a manager's decision that the cashier could inform me about. The only issue is that according to research by TARP (Technical Assistance Research Programs), only one in 27 dissatisfied customers actually bother to complain. The problem with this is that now complaining customers have a much bigger forum in which to complain so the message that brands and big corporations don't care about their customers spreads a lot faster.

I've sent the link to this blog post to Starbucks' customer service and look forward to seeing if I will get any kind of response - although I doubt it very much. If I get something, it will probably be some kind of watered down American legal bullcock about policies - rather than focusing on the actual complaint.

They could definitely do with reading the best-selling book co-authored by Janelle Barlow and my father, Claus Moller, about complaint handling and customer service: "A Complaint is a Gift". I'm sure an update will follow based on the reply (if any) I receive.

Personal Branding: it's still the same thing

I had a very weird experience this evening (one of two that I will tell you about). I got sent a link to a very short article by Kaye Z. Marks called "Corporate Branding vs. Personal Branding". I quickly read through it (it's very short) and I couldn't help but feel that I knew this many years ago. It made me think back to Tom Peters' concept of "Brand You", which dates all the way back to 1997. Re-tracing my steps I decided to go back into the archives of my mind (and the web ;-)) and pulled out a couple of interesting things that Tom Peters wrote. If you really want to learn about personal branding - and remember that its relevance is much greater today than when TP thought of it - then I suggest you go and have a look at the original stuff:

• The Brand Called You - from FastCompany, 1997
  
• Brand You Survival Kit - from FastCompany, 2004
  

Bad logos, pt. I

I've seen so many bad logos recently you wouldn't believe it so I thought I would gather a few of them here in some posts for your amusement and delectation. One of the key things I noticed is that right now, where our design language is very free flowing and we use a lot of curves a lot of things to do with either health or children seem to take on completely sexual meanings and it's shocking that nobody on the client side has even noticed this. Come on, how could anybody think that the Arlington Paediatric Center logo was a good idea?

Anyhoo... time to get on with the first batch of BAD LOGOS!

1. London 2012 Olympics
I think all of my faithful readers already know that I really dislike this logo immensely...


2. Arlington Pediatric Center - how could anybody fail to see what this looks like?

3. Kids Exchange - oh for crying out loud!

4. Kudawara Pharmacy, Japan - I'll have some of that...

5. Clinica Dental - why, oh why?


6. Computer Doctors - maybe they should've had a designer as well...


I think that one of the key lessons here is that very often you can actually get away without having a logo - e.g. in the case of Clinica Dental, Arlington Pediatric Center and the Computer Doctors - and in those cases it would probably have been best not to have the logos above. However, what do you do when it becomes a very important symbol that is supposed to unite not only the people working for the organisation, but also inspire the external stakeholders? The London 2012 logo has been roundly slated by the public here in London, but I would love to hear from somebody who works at LOCOG (the organising committee) about how it's viewed internally and how people felt at its unveiling.

That's all for this batch of bad logos. Don't forget to send me any crappy logos that you find so they can be included in a future post.