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.

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?

Space Jump Gets Viewers. But Does Branded Content Really Fly?

Wave Goodbye to Branded Content Myths

Humanity loves watching the truly daring. From NASA projects to high altitude ballooning and trips around the world, my adult life has been paced by some fascinating events.

So it was with tremendous awe, excitement and fun on Sunday that my family watched the TiVO playback of Discovery Channel coverage of the space jump – where Felix Baumgartner jumped from 128,000 feet, lost control in a tumble, fell at more than the speed of sound, then opened a parachute and landed on his feet. (And, tested a possible high altitude emergency escape for astronauts.)

This morning we find that apparently around 8 million YouTube viewers watched the event. (Link here.) (As always…we’re not really certain what a YouTube viewer means since I can count as 15 YouTube viewers given all the devices I use.)

True to form the online advertising enthusiasts are ready to jump on these numbers as “proof” of the power of branded content. Branded content? Articles I read today remind me that Red Bull sponsored the jumper (I’d forgotten already). So, enthusiasts are taking “sponsored” and deciding that it is clearly “branded content”. Whatever.

Anyway, when it comes to numbers we need to be more skeptical.

What the Space Jump Really Proves is That Traditional Media Remains the Best Driver of Demand. After all…

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..

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.

Why Does JC Penney’s Struggle?

After all the hoopla of hiring an Apple magician (only magical, of course, because he was at Apple) and the hype surrounding some really odd advertising, why is it that JC Penney’s is struggling?

Let me refer you to two really interesting posts on the topic.

The first post is found on the HBR website (link here) and suggests that there’s a fundamental flaw in the idea of “Fair Price”.

Award Show Skepticism: An “Effie” for Old Spice?

I wasn’t entirely shocked to see that the Old Spice social media video campaign had won an Effie – a lot of people in the ad business seem to have decided this campaign was the grand epiphany of social media effectiveness. Except, I’d done some reading about the effectiveness of the campaign and found its results entirely unclear.

There Is No “ROI vs Brand” Dilemma When You Know Your “Profit Horizon”.

Far too many “smart” (aka self-conciously cool) agencies these days proudly seek talent from anywhere EXCEPT business backgrounds. They believe, they say, that these fundamental skills for understanding arcane concepts like “profit” get in the way of true creativity. (More on this mis-direction in a future post about an ad biz culture I call “creative correctness”.)

But this outright avoidance of business skills in the agency business has led us to the endless (and frankly silly) discussion about deciding between “ROI” and “brand”.

Bunkum. There’s no contradiction between these two – not when you think like a business. The needs of your business must be met – and that means creating advertising which brands AND delivers ROI.

New Book: “Building Brand with Direct Response Television”

With the October edition of Response Magazine, we have released my book “Building Brand with Direct Response Television“. This book takes an unusual look at DRTV – focusing on it’s biggest potential power: building brands while driving immediate sales (at retail as well as direct).

This book is the result of the past decade when I’ve written extensively about direct response television (DRTV) and it pulls together a comprehensive view of how DRTV can build brand, drive retail, and, in the process, dramatically change the marketing game.