At Walgreens: An Amazing Abuse Of the Customer Satisfaction Survey

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about how fed up I am with customer satisfaction surveys (link here). Truth is that companies are out of control – thinking it’s the job of consumers to fill out a constant stream of surveys.

So I’m going to pick on Walgreens here – not because they are the worst. But because I have recent Walgreens experiences that show how messed up this constant survey abuse is.

What Happened at Walgreens. At the time of my prior post, Skye Weadick sent me a photo of what she saw at one drive-up pharmacy window at a Walgreen’s…which I added to that post.

The desperation evident in that sign seemed bad enough. Really? Asking customers to come around, park, and walk in to the store to fill out a survey?

Except… I was at a Walgreen’s this week – a different one – and heard an amazing employee discussion with two people in line.

Agencies Need to Be Good Stewards of Their Own Brand

I’m often amazed at how poorly agencies manage their own marketing – especially their own brand. Look across the ad biz and you’ll find a cacophony of agency names in an ever changing landscape.

You might assume these changes reflect agencies going in and out of business. That’s not usually the truth. There is a tendency in the agency business to chase name fads – a practice that leads to annual or biannual name changing as a matter of course (as in “this year the coolest agency names are based on…insects…so we’re changing our name to FleaBag”). In an amazing act of euphemism, I’ve heard this called “re-branding”.

The Brand Building Power of Product Advertising

Funny how names are. A specific type of advertising was labeled “brand advertising”. So the myth developed that in order to build brand, you need to use brand advertising.

Except, it isn’t true. And with billions of dollars of revenue on the line, it’s time advertisers got smarter. Because here’s the real brand truth:

1. All types of advertising build brand.

2. The type which is most effective changes – depending on your company, brand, consumer, profit structure and product or service situation.

3. Quite often a mix of types is most effective – a mix which may or may not include “brand advertising”.

The Brand Building Power of Product Advertising Given this truth, it’s sad that one particularly powerful tool is also one of the least understood by agencies & the ad biz — advertising which uses the product to build brand.

Using Satisfaction Surveys to Create Unhappy Customers

Anti-motivational website Despair.com offers as their customer service mantra: We’re not satisfied ’til you’re not satisfied.

Pretty funny. But while I may love that crack, it looks like satisfaction survey teams at most major corporations have missed the point and have chosen dissatisfaction as their goal.

How? By pestering us with “satisfaction” surveys. How many more will I be asked to complete? I don’t care any more. Because that’s it. I’m done.

I PLEDGE TO IGNORE ALL SATISFACTION SURVEYS!!!!

This is a tough step for a strong advocate for consumer research. But can we just have done with satisfaction survey burn out?

AT&T Overload. I shopped at the AT&T store this week. Bought a screen protector (yup, a cheap film to cover an iPad screen). Total time required: 2 minutes. Next day, AT&T texts me twice for 2 different surveys. Would I please rate my experience on a scale of 1 to 10? And would I recommend AT&T to my friends?

Apple & Application Software…iOS6 Maps Debacle Looks like Final Cut Fiasco

I wrote my letter today to Tim Cook (CEO, Apple) informing him that, as a result of the Final Cut Pro/FCP-X debacle, starting 11/1 my company will create no new FCP projects.

As I wrote, it hit me – the iOS6 Maps fiasco and the Final Cut Pro debacle have eerie similarities…

New Confirmation that Offline Advertising Drives Online Success

Just about 2 years ago I wrote a post looking at how online success required offline advertising. (Link here.) But there is a lot of hype about the rate of online change – so that opinion must be stale, right? After all, among the “cyber hipsters” (as I saw them described today) everything off-line dimishes and fades. But cyber hipsterism doesn’t often reflect reality.

A new study about TV shows nothing has changed and that “TV Ads Lift Online Sales Conversion” (Link here.) The study clearly showed an increase in both traffic and conversion that resulted from TV advertising. This is no surprise for those of us who work in TV. But it is confirming to find that there’s hard data to back up what we all experience.

Unfortunately, many online companies struggle to leverage TV.

Lets Hold the Panic About Retail Showrooming – It’s Driven by Research Errors

I discovered an excellent blog post (link here) this week about marketers being mis-led by major research mistakes. One of his main examples? How “showrooming” fears have been blown out of proportion..

Apple vs Samsung Reminds Us: What’s Obvious Today Was Obscure in the Past

‘The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.

“Creativity in living is not without its attendant difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. And the unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time is that when people finally realize you were right, they’ll say it was obvious all along.” Alan Ashley-Pitt as quoted in “The Wonderful Crisis of Middle Age” by Eda LeShan

And so we find on Page 46 of 109 in the Apple-Samsung jury instructions this rather concerning issue: “Obviousness”. Specifically:

“A utility patent claim is invalid if the claimed invention would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the field at the time of invention”

Now I’m no expert in the specifics of this trial. But this fundamental idea concerns me. Because there’s a strange relationship between what’s obvious today and what would have been obvious before a product was released.

Copying Apple makes it far easier to introduce new phones and give them the appearance of “exciting”.

Research Shows that Smart Phones HELP Retail

The tech theorizers have suckered us into a mythology – the one where the Four Virtual Horsemen of the Tech Apocalypse destroy whatever they touch.

So, as soon as someone saw the first retail store shopper pull their smart phone out, tech titans started taking credit for the destruction of retail. But, new Deloitte research (link here) suggests we might want to keep our retail outlets open after all.

The Power of Low & Consistent Mass Media Spending

Advertising is far too often driven by lore and anecdote – even when it comes to media spending.

So it was refreshing to read Byron Sharp’s latest post “A Little Advertising Goes a Long Way” (link here). Sharp focuses on campaigns with huge media bursts and finds that far too often they’re tremendously inefficient.