Hi, I'm Kelly, the co-founder, creative director, and senior copywriter at Positive advertising: a quick case study of Comcast vs Qwest
Comcast and Qwest/Century Link are their own worst enemies. Alone, each is already known for their startlingly poor reputations. Pitted against each other, they only make it worse.
One of the first things you learn in the advertising profession is to avoid negative advertising. You don’t talk poorly about your competitors. In fact, you essentially pretend they do not exist, because when someone is reading your ad there is no competition. If you’ve done your ad right, all attention is on you.
When you mention your competitor in a negative light, you do two things, both bad. 1) You use your valuable ad space to bring your competitor to the awareness of your audience, and 2) You undermine the very trust your ad should be instilling by making yourself look petty and underhanded.
Comcast and Qwest/Century Link have been slinging mud at each other in print, direct mail, and online advertising for months now. Ever since Qwest announced it had sold to Century Link, Comcast started the mud-slinging. Their direct mail letter headlined with, “You shouldn’t be forced to switch to a phone company you didn’t even choose,” a statement which has no intrinsic meaning or value in the context of business since the customer would inherently choose Century Link if they, like Qwest, were the only land line phone company in town.
Qwest did the polar opposite of the right thing — which would have been to ignore the negativity — and began their own campaign of negative advertising. Their online ads now headline with, “Don’t put up with cable rate hikes,” an unnecessary jab at Comcast which is misleading if not totally incorrect. (Cable phone stays the same price, and cable internet bounces all over the board, lacking consistency in either direction. One month it’s $25, the next $65, the one after $35.)
Both Comcast and Qwest are doing nothing with these headlines but taking pot shots at each other. They are both known for their awful reputations (see the Comcast Must Die site), and these negative ads only serve to drag them down even further. The likely result: more people will switch to cell phones with 4G data plans. Neither Qwest nor Comcast win the war. They just look (even more) like losers.
Once a consumer knows that you’re willing to sling mud in the face of your competition, they can rightfully judge that you’ll do the same thing to them. It’s a character thing. If you treat a competitor with such disrespect, it is not a leap to realize that it’s even easier for you to treat individuals (a.k.a. customers) the same way.
When you plan your next ad campaign, don’t do what Comcast and Qwest did. Create a positive advertising campaign that touts your merits, keeps it real, and shows how you respect people. Keep your ad messaging positive, and you can win respect, trust and the all-important business without ever having to get your hands dirty.
An 800% slower life and business
All the attention on slowed down songs last year had me wondering if we ought not be slowing down instead of constantly looking for ways to speed up.
It seems as if the rationale for a rocket-speed fast lane life is that one can fit more into the limited time we have, yet that is arguably impossible. Enjoyment is enjoyment. More or less of it in a 24-hour period generally provides the exact same amount of satisfaction.
Listening to Justin Bieber 800% slower is one of the more relaxing music experiences I’ve had since Moby’s last track on ‘Play,’ a similarly pleasing piece of ear candy titled, ‘My Weakness.’
Doing virtually everything faster can lead to only larger divisions between what we want and what we need, which in turn leads to a lower quality life — shorter attention spans, greater distraction, shorter amounts of free time, smaller levels of satisfaction, worse health, less time to reflect and learn, decisions made under duress, more danger, less sleep, less happiness.
A focus on moving slower allows for greater quality in nearly every respect. Quality of work, quality of life, quality time, well-informed decisions, greater satisfaction, time to reflect and learn, more sleep, better health, more security, more happiness.
Perhaps our weakness is our focus on speed – as in the tortoise and the hare.
Would an 800% slower business be any less successful than one moving at lightspeed? It depends on your vision of success.
FedEx probably ought to stick with the hi-speed thing, but if your business model does not include ‘superfast’ maybe you ought to try slowing down a bit. Reflecting on what works can provide fuel for greater effectiveness, enjoyment and success, but only if you slow down to look at it. Maybe not 800%, but make it significant so you can feel the difference.
Just awesome – the passion of cycling personified
Where most industries exist to support commerce, the cycling industry exists to support shared passion for the awesome feeling of riding your bike. Vittoria captures that passion in this video by 341Production at the 2011 Giro d’Italia. Watch this full-screen.
The shot of the rider making his way through and then emerging from the stone tunnel made my heart soar. Riding the bike, and climbing in particular, is the best feeling I have ever experienced.
I’ve done a lot of work in the cycling community, for bicycle manufacturers, component companies, advocacy organizations, and more. The bicycle industry always has a tight-knit feeling. I frequently meet people in it who barely eek out a living, but they keep doing it because they truly love the sport and want to help people get involved with it. Many industries can be like this, but aren’t.
How are you applying your most joyful passion to your work?
4 simple steps to providing great customer service
Providing great customer service is the key to gaining trust, earning repeat business, and keeping people happy. It really takes only a few simple practices to show off your great customer service skills, and it never fails to impress. Here are a few steps I live by:
1. Know your stuff inside out, and keep updating your knowledge.
2. Listen to your customers. They will tell you what they need. If you don’t know how to listen, read up on ‘active listening.’
3. Deliver on your promises for service, budget and deadlines. If you know your stuff and listen to your customers, it’s easy to do great work.
4. Provide what the customer needs, and if you can’t do that, refer them to someone who can.
Some years ago, companies began trying to push the products and services they had instead of providing what the customer needed. It is always better to refer the customer to a better source if you are unable to provide what they want yourself. They will remember and appreciate your helpful nature.
If you’re not already doing these things, try them out. I’ll bet you my favorite customer service book they’ll work.
How good customer service keeps you healthy and wealthy
There are two choices in every customer service interaction. You can satisfy the customer, or tell them you don’t want their business. Every single interaction boils down to those two options. Investment of time in anything other than those two realities is a waste of resources because any secondary interactions will ultimately lead back to the same place: satisfaction or elimination.
If you are satisfying customers, you are keeping your brand reputation healthy. If you are fighting with customers because of something you did (like over-billing), you are damaging your brand, and very likely losing business.
Keeping a healthy brand reputation intact costs far less than attempting to repair a damaged brand. One involves maintaining good practices, while the other goes much deeper, usually involving rooting out an infected company policy, followed by employee training, apologizing to customers, a PR campaign, a website overhaul, and a new advertising campaign. See how that adds up?
Good customer service is good marketing
‘Do unto others’ is a great rule to apply to all businesses. It’s good customer service and smart marketing. Treat people with respect, and they will respect you. If you treat them poorly, they will find they don’t need you.
The scenario: A customer calls to complain they have been overbilled by $10 every month for two years, and they have the paperwork to prove it. Your company can easily see he is correct, but you have a policy of crediting bills for only up to six months. Your company would have to refund $240. In a monotone voice, your customer service representative tells the customer they will not do the refund, and to pay their bill, or service will be interrupted… In essence to go pound sand.
The common solution: Do everything you can to beat down the customer’s will and keep their money, without regard for retaining their business.
The better solution: Give them their money back without any fight whatsoever. If you know you are wrong, don’t fight about it, and you will keep a happy customer. If you have documentation which clearly shows the customer is wrong, prove it by sending it to them, with no disrespect or fighting.
For anyone thinking your company would not treat customers to the above scenario, you would be surprised at how common this policy is for large corporations. Telecoms and cable companies in particular are famous for it (what a terrible thing to be famous for!), as well as banks and mortgage companies.
Good customer service is good marketing. It’s a rule to thrive by.
Pink toenails and the end of gender rules
Hats off to J.Crew president and creative director Jenna Lyons who had the good taste, confidence, and authenticity to let marketing send an email out to their database featuring a photo of her son with his freshly painted neon pink toenails. It’s about time we saw that kind of authenticity in advertising.
Some people didn’t really see it that way, which is really just another way of saying they didn’t really see it all. Outraged critics said the ad celebrated transgendered children, as if that was a bad thing. Is it better to hide them all away in locked chests, and pretend they don’t exist? The critics seem to forget they are talking about living, breathing human beings, with parents and siblings, eyes, ears, and — I don’t know — feelings and choices of their own.
“This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a FoxNews.com Health column about the ad. The key word in that sentence being “trappings.” Gender rules exist primarily to trap consumers into thought patterns that encourage more spending. People can figure out their own leanings without a bunch of arbitrary societal gender rules.
We are now beginning to see, at last, that gender rules are no longer all that relevant. Authenticity is relevant, and J.Crew seems to get that, at least with this ad.
Why there was any debate at all about it, be it on Fox News, Sodahead (40 pages of comments? Come on!), in the social media world (a 500 tweet blip on Twitter), or wherever, suggests simply that people have too much time on their hands. Who cares if a boy likes neon pink toenails? Maybe he’s color blind. Maybe he just likes pink. Who cares? Jenna Lyons has at least one value — that of open-mindedness — that I’d like to see in the future mother of my children, or at least in society at large.
If we took gender rules completely out of the social picture, what would happen? Would it render utter mayhem in the streets? Would the sky crack open and acid-baked space lizards rain down upon us? Would all men’s wives paint their power tools the colors of the rainbow? And all women’s husbands paint their toenails dark blue? Kinda’ doubt it! We don’t need no stinking gender rules. We need an open dialog, open minds.
Since this is a marketing blog…
It is almost always a good idea to break social norms and take calculated risks in marketing. The appropriateness debate has less to do with guidelines and more to do with being honest and authentic, and discarding any false sense of how things are “supposed to be.” If someone disagrees, so what? Let them eat toenails. Keep the customer in mind, be true to your brand, create and spread authenticity, and you will inevitably connect.
What’s big?
Big is your dream or vision.
Big is unconcerned with size.
Big is branding with integrity.
Big is your passion.
Big is marketing with honesty.
Possibilities are big.
Creating is big.
Thinking is big.
Acting is the bigger next step.
What are you dreaming/creating/thinking/doing?
The business mirror
Big business seems to be coming to a close, and they know it. Why else would they so relentlessly, so aggressively, so ridiculously come after prospects today? No company can be that lacking in good ol’ smarts, can they?
Here’s an example: ING recently added me to their email marketing list. I have never contacted that bank, yet they have begun marketing to me with some of the least appealing email marketing pieces I’ve ever seen. The bottom actually says, “Replies to this email end up in a black hole. If you need to reach us, email us at sales@ingdirect.com.” Translation: ‘We at ING don’t care about you. Go away. Oh, but give us your money. And our sales department is rude.’
There is no more surefire way to damage a brand than to insult consumers. ING (or any company who messages in this way) will have an incredibly hard time gaining the privilege of having my business. There is no excuse for treating prospective customers with disrespect. With the startlingly bad reputation most banks now have, every one of them needs to show a new level of respect to their existing and prospective customers. When companies market in the way that ING is doing, the message they send is that people are commodity. People naturally respond, in kind, by regarding banks as commodity. (That’s called lost opportunity. If you are going to spend the time, energy and money to market your business, do it well.)
Consumers act as mirrors. If they don’t know you, they usually respond with the same level of respect you showed them. If you are rude to them, they are rude to you. If you are kind to them, they are kind to you. If you are respectful, and show that you value them in a meaningful way, they are much more likely to offer you that all-valuable positive response, and just maybe bestow you with the honor of earning their trust and giving you their business.
How going gluten-free changed my life
This was inspired by a post on Joel Comm’s blog.
Eliminating gluten from my diet has resulted in weight loss, better breathing, better digestion, clearer skin, and a significant hike in energy. My prescription drug needs reduced as a result too, saving money.
I’m not a wheat or gluten expert, so this post is written solely from personal experience, but that experience has been profound. I’m writing this so that it might inspire some of you to investigate the underlying causes of some of your health issues.
I’ve been fit most of my life, so I’ve never consciously dieted, however, I have made some big changes over the years in quantity and quality of meals. As a life-long cyclist, I learned to graze throughout the day instead of sitting down for large meals. I find it far more effective to eat about six smaller meals per day instead of the standard three. Large meals tend to make me tired, and cause me to reach for the coffee or tea in order to get through the work day, whereas smaller meals keep me satisfied and energized throughout the day.
The two biggest quality changes I’ve made are the elimination of cereal and gluten from my menu.
Why cereal? I learned a few years ago that ingredients in boxed cereal are processed up to three or more times before they are packaged up. By the time the substances reach you, your body has no idea how to process them effectively, so you’re just eating empty calories, which leaves you hungry and wanting more, while overworking your digestive system. I lost 13 pounds without even trying after eliminating cereal from my diet. A few years later, a friend suggested I eliminate gluten from my diet.
Eliminating gluten was the second big change that made a huge impact on my overall health. My energy level skyrocketed and my digestion dramatically improved. When your digestion is good, virtually everything else improves. I had asthma before I stopped eating gluten; now it’s virtually gone. I used to get a bloated stomach after eating pasta or drinking a beer, but with rice pasta and sorghum beer, I’m happily bloat-free. (I disliked the taste of rice pasta at first, but now I far prefer it.)
(Sorghum beer, by the way, tastes every bit as good as an amber or bitter microbrew. Do I miss a porter or thick stout? Yeah, for sure, but the trade-off is well worth it. There are three sorghum beers available nationwide: New Grist, Bard’s, and Red Bridge (tastes more like a lager). There are also some Belgian gluten-free beers that are super stiff and good for getting tanked if you’re into that, but they’re too strong for my palette. Before I discovered sorghum beer, my stomach would visibly, uncomfortably stretch to epic proportions after a beer, and I felt awful, but sorghum beer goes down just as easily as fruit juice.)
The denial factor with wheat and gluten
When you’ve grown up eating wheat all of your life, the common reaction people have upon trying to eliminate gluten (wheat, oats, barley, rye) is that it’s virtually impossible. Wheat is the core ingredient in bread, pasta, and other regular staples of a human diet. When you start scrutinizing food labels, you find that wheat is in nearly everything. It’s even used as a stabilizing agent in sausage, vegetarian “meat” products, ice cream and ketchup.
So how do you avoid gluten? It’s really pretty simple. All you have to do is weigh the health benefits versus the pain-in-the-tail factor, then stop eating processed foods.
I eat mostly rice, fruits and vegetables. Add in soy yogurt, coconut milk, palm and olive oil, eggs, sunflower butter, and gluten-free bread, and that’s pretty much my daily diet. I can go out to eat, but I just have to be careful to ask about ingredients.
You are not a cow
Do you really need filler in your diet? Wheat is used as a filler agent in a majority of processed and packaged foods. It serves no practical purpose in most food recipes, except to add in some protein (which could easily be sourced from less offensive ingredients), so when I say filler agent, that is quite literally what it is. It fattens you up without providing nutritional value. Cows are fattened up to increase their heft before slaughter. Do you need more heft?
Wheat is a grass, one of the most common human allergens on the planet. So why would you want to eat it? Well, you wouldn’t, unless you were a cow. You’re not a cow are you? (I’ve yet to meet a cow who could read, so I’m guessing not.)
Gluten inhibits effective digestion
Gluten causes the villi in your intestinal tract to get knocked down, so that it lays flat. Why is this a problem? In order for your body to efficiently absorb nutrients, the villi need to be in their natural position, standing up, allowing nutrients to be absorbed and processed.
Wikipedia has this to say about how villi work: In all humans, the villi together increase intestinal absorptive surface area approximately 30-fold and 60-fold, respectively, providing exceptionally efficient absorption of nutrients in the lumen. This increases the surface area so there are more places for food to be absorbed.
The health problems gluten can cause
When the villi lie flat, nutrients cannot be effectively absorbed, which starves your body, resulting in you feeling hungry, which in turn results in you eating more food. It’s a vicious cycle that perpetually overworks your digestive system, resulting in weight gain, poor digestion, bowel issues, breathing problems, skin problems, sleep apnea, inflammation, and joint pain– OH MY! Yes, consumption of gluten truly can cause or be a contributing factor to all of these problems. It can also cause anaphylactic shock if you’re allergic.
Wheat and gluten are allergens
After I had completely eliminated gluten for about a year, I had a wheat-free, but apparently not gluten-free, porter beer one night, and my throat closed, confirming that I am indeed allergic to gluten. Be aware that when you eliminate an allergen from your diet, your sensitivity to it may increase.
To complicate things just a bit, there are different classes of allergies, including wheat allergy, gluten allergy, celiac disease, and others. I first tried eliminating just wheat, and I saw some improvement, but when I completely eliminated gluten, I experienced far more overall health improvement.
I happened to be endowed with a plethora of other food allergies, including all nuts, apple and pear pectin, raw carrots, and tomatoes, so crafting a diet was that much more complicated, but again, the health benefits far outweigh any perceived PITA factor.
Here are some helpful resources for eliminating gluten from your diet:
EatingWell: Should You Go Gluten-Free?
Livestrong: How to Go Gluten Free
EverydayHealth: How to Go Gluten-Free
Wikipedia’s Gluten-Free diet page
GlutenFreeLiving: How To Get Started
eHow: How to Go Gluten-Free on a Budget
GlutenFreeGoddess: Cooking Gluten-Free
