Forgotten Reputation

With a hat tip to Paul Williams, I’d like to remind everyone not to forget reputation. 

• Brand = Reputation
• Image = Reputation
• Survival = Reputation

In the sink or swim world we live in, reputation is everything.  Sure, you can get by for a little while skating around like an elephant on an April ice sheet, but sooner or later you’ll crash through into the hypothermia-inducing water (i.e. have to go out of business).  If not go out of business, you’ll have to run and hide.  Or change your name and move to a non-extradition country with lax laws regarding entry.

In order to get repeat business–or even stay in business at all–you’ll have to manage your reputation.  And with a bad experience spreading on the Internet faster than a virus in a 90 minute horror movie, you have to regularly stay on top of what’s being said about you–and who’s saying it.

Nobody has the luxury of enough time to constantly monitor their mentions online by going from site to site haphazardly.  That’s why you can setup a Google Alert for your name, company, product, or anything.  Google with its minions spiders all over the ‘net will let you know when your alert word is mentioned.

Your survival in business and your professional survival is all about your reputation.  As Paul points out, many people lose touch with what a “brand” is.  What people think of when they hear, “Mac”, “F150″, or “Coach purse” is reputation.  I’ve never owned a Mac, F150, or a Coach purse, but because of their reputation I have an opinion of those brands.

• Do you monitor your brands, products, or person online?
• What products/brands do you want based on reputation only?
• What products/brands do you want nothing to do with based on reputation only?

Corporate Rock Stars Speak

Quite frequently, people have bad experiences as a customer and reach out to a company looking for help. So many times, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, you’ll end up on the line at a customer service center in Bangladesh with a nice guy named, Phil. Phil will listen to your problem and offer advice in broken English. I actually use the name “Phil” as an inside joke to myself, but I have experience with emailing a “guy” named “Phil” who seems to work 24/7 and always signs his name followed by a “T” and a double digit number. For example, an email will say,

“Your request have been forwarded. Thank you, Phil. T38”

Unfortunately, the “Phil”s of the world aren’t always able to solve problems. This leads to many blogging about their experience or performing an “executive email carpet bomb.” Surprisingly enough, some CEOs and high-level executives are reading blogs. They must have been smart enough to setup a Google Alert with their company’s name.

Even more surprising, some of these higher ups, are even responding to blogs. I had Chris Baggott, from Compendium Blogware, comment here. And I was recently reading a post where Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh commented. Though, I’ve not bought from Zappos (I’ve tried buying footwear online and so far it hasn’t worked out), I have heard from many people that Zappos’ customer service is excellent. (One of my workers’ brothers actually works there—I believe they have a location near Louisville, Kentucky.) So when Tony Hsieh from Zappos or Chris Baggott from Compendium or any big time business person comments on blogs it adds a more personal face to the company.

I read many prominent national bloggers on the Daily Fix and Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist; and for the star-struck bloggers like myself, reading a comment by a CEO is like being in the same room as one. I don’t have any of them giving me advice or meeting me for a drink, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. While Slash, Willie Mays, or Sean Connery would be awesome to meet, I’d actually rather meet a successful business person like Warren Buffett or the aforementioned CEOs. I’ll never have the talent of Slash, Willie Mays, or Sean Connery, but who knows, I could be a successful business person someday. And if any successful business people have advice, I’d be more than happy to listen to the corporate rock stars speak. I probably just have to be a majority shareholder in their company to get noticed…

Fire Your Ad Agency!

Maybe firing them is a bit extreme, but today I read an article that said make your marketing budget work by cutting it in half. Before I even got to the suggestion of why a company would do that I already knew why that was a good idea. What happens when you halve your budget? You have less to work with, of course. When you have less to work with, you have to work smarter and more efficiently. All of sudden, you see less money going out and more money coming in. You adapted; and it was a success.

According to Plato, necessity is the mother of invention. I strongly believe he’s right. From a biology standpoint, when something needs to be done it either gets done or you die off. It’s the same in the business world. Sometimes you need to get off the ground, spread your wings, and quit being a dinosaur. Whether that’s cleaning house or rethinking your entire image, a big change in results requires a big change in action.

Write that down, it’s important:

“A big change in results requires a big change in action.”

Read the entire article and then get to work.

Retail Tech Giants Man Up

In a story that surprised me, I just read that not all adopters of the ill-fated HD-DVD technology will spend eternity on a couch next to a stuffy man smoking a pipe and flaunting his contrasting elbow patches while they try to get at the root of abandonment issues caused by Toshiba pulling the plug after a short-lived, much-hyped battle with Sony over the next generation of home video. Despite it being 30 years full of bombs since the Walkman was introduced, Sony was bound to have another hit someday. Unfortunately for Toshiba and HD-DVD purchasers, Sony won with Blu-ray technology. So what’s an early adopter to do? Take a leap ala the stock brokers in the 1930’s?

Well, some will learn their lesson—though most won’t. However, if they bought their HD-DVD player from Best Buy, they’ll be able to get $50 on a gift card to soothe the pain of those who bought before the guillotine dropped. Granted $50 isn’t the $200 or $400 these people spent to get the player, it is a very smart move by Best Buy. Through credit card purchases, RewardZone records, or any other data trail they can sort through Best Buy will mail out $50 gift cards. Circuit City is extending its return policy to 90 days also (refund will be in the form of store credit). Certainly this isn’t as big. It tends to help those few who used their Christmas cash to buy HD-DVD, and it handsomely helps them big time. Though the early adopters are left holding the bag—and to be completely fair, they knew it was a risk of being an early adopter.

Best Buy and Circuit City are certainly trying to clean up their image a little and I think it’s a great PR move. I was actually strongly considering both purchasing an HD-DVD player as a gift and one for myself this holiday season. (Although the best prices I could consistently find were on Amazon.) I ended up doing something else for the gift and getting a steal on an upconvert DVD player for myself. It’ll last me until I get a Blu-ray player. I just hope prices will plummet in the next 6-18 months as more are bought (economies of scale—not demand).

A lot of people hate Best Buy and Circuit City, but like I said, I think this is a good move for corporate image. Does anyone see this as a bad thing? Any shareholders out there like to comment? Any HD-DVD buyers getting in on a refund?

When Good Corporate Images Go Bad

In what has become something of a classic, The Simpsons’ episode entitled “Lisa’s First Word” (Season 4, Episode 10) features a clown bed that Homer builds for Bart because Lisa needs the crib and Bart loves Krusty the Clown. Unfortunately, Homer’s creation is more Pennywise than Bozo. What follows is Bart spending the night in the creepy clown bed envisioning the evil clown coming to life. The next day we find young Bart in the living room holding himself in the fetal position and repeating, “Can’t sleep; clown’ll eat me.”

It turns out that such a response isn’t all that far from the truth. Scientific research has actually concluded that kids don’t like clowns. Some suggest that the era we live in with televisions and Elmo-on-demand has made clowns outdated as an entertainment source. From my own childhood experience, I didn’t particularly dislike clowns (though I didn’t like them either), but scariest movie was Poltergeist. And it was known around my house as “the clowny movie.” If you don’t remember the scene, I’ve got it for you here.

So what happens when you find out the beloved corporate image you’ve spent years building scares the very people you’re trying to target? If you haven’t paid attention in the past few decades, one of the largest restaurant—and I use that term loosely—chains uses a clown as its mascot. Ronald McDonald is a legend. And yet, he’s a clown. Should McDonalds lose the clown? Should they ignore the masses, including adults, who don’t like clowns? Mickey D’s doesn’t have clown wallpaper and I haven’t seen a new commercial featuring Ronald in a very long time. Has upper management decided to put Ronald in the closet? With locations all across this great country and beyond, does the use of a clown in corporate image hurt McDonalds at all? I’ve got to guess that’s probably not the case. Most people wouldn’t want to find a mouse in their home, but Chuck E. Cheese is also a corporate icon.

Not too many people are afraid of Romans, so Little Cesar is safe. Colonel Sanders and Wendy are people, so no worries there. Chick-fil-a uses a cow and I’m pretty sure in the history of man no one’s been afraid of an unprovoked cow. The King is pretty creepy and I know of people (myself included) that eat at Burger King less or not at all now that BK has decided to use the creepy king to hock its burgers. Subway has Jared, who isn’t even fictional; Arby’s has recently used an oven mitt, which is pretty harmless; White Castle, Hardees, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, and plenty of others have no personified animal or object in their current use.

I have no doubts kids will want to go someplace based on the character at the door, but are kids (or adults) avoiding altogether some places based on a creepy character? What’s your personal experience?

Creativity, Laziness, or Another Texting Consequence?

I have no idea what “Shiny Shiny” is, but I stumbled upon (the original stumbled) their site when tooting around Technorati this morning. (Shameless plug: you can add me to your favorites if you haven’t already.) A post caught my attention, “Txt Spk baby names? Oh dear God in heaven…” The post brought up that some are suggesting people are now starting to name their children with crazy spellings, punctuations, and capitalizations after too much texting.

With a name like Michael, you’d think I’d be staunchly in favor of creative names dripping with individuality. But that’s not actually true. It turns out that people continually misspell and mispronounce Michael. There are also plenty of people that think because my name is Michael that they can automatically shorten it to any of the common shortened versions that other Michaels prefer to go by. People always butcher my last name, but Michael has been a common name for a long time. Not only was it in the Bible, meaning it’s been around for at least two millennia, Michael has been one of the two most popular boys’ names in the U.S. for each of the last 53 years (holding the number 1 spot from 1961-1998). So if people can’t get my name right, I have little hope anything a kid gets named will be spelled and pronounced correctly 80% of the time without making the name particularly unique in spelling or pronunciation.

I think this brings up the question, is it creativity, laziness, or another texting consequence? In my years as a teacher, I had a wide variety of student names (and Michael wasn’t the most common). Those kids were named a long time before texting, so apparently this isn’t a new problem. At best (worst?), it’s a growing problem. Of course, there’s one other option that could be the root of the problem: ignorance. It’s quite feasible that some kids get misspelled names because the parent doesn’t know how to spell the name they are giving to their child.

Even more interesting than “why” is what are the effects of misspelled, unique, creative, original, or uncommon names? All kids are made fun of and I suspect everyone has their name messed up at least once by a teacher. What are the effects on a child’s brand, their personal, corporate image, if you will? I actually read a study within the past year or so that claimed people with names that were hard to pronounce were less likely to be brought in for an interview when seeking employment. It was easier for the hiring manager to bring in someone whose name they could easily pronounce. Do you think a crazy name helps or hurts a person?

And for anyone still confused, it’s Michael just like Jordan and Lombardi just like the trophy. Say it with me, “My-cull Lum-bar-dee.” Once more, real fast, “Mycull Lumbardee.” Not as hard as it looks; now, how do you say yours?