Marketing – is a lot about persistence

Customer Delight, Marketing, persistence, service quality

I had written in September about my trip to Jaipur and how the staff at the Radisson hotel over there were so persistence that I comment on TripAdvisor if I found their service good. Not only did they delight my family and me with their service, they also ensured that I recognised their work, so that more people would come to stay in their hotel.

Today I just came back after a two night stay at another leading American Five Star Chain hotel in Gurugram. There’s a reason I am not naming the hotel here. The whole staff was very pleasant and the restaurant staff was extremely helpful and we had an excellent stay. However no one persisted with pushing me to rate them on Trip Advisor. So even though they gave me excellent service, I will not talk about them.

Most human beings are inherently lazy and will not go out of their way to do something, leave alone leave a comment on TripAdvisor. But if you are in the hotel industry and if you have raving fans, then your rooms will always be full. Its an uphill task to always keep delighting your customers, but terrific companies do it.

This is all marketing and I notice when people do something exceptionally well to delight their customer. In most hotels in India, the service levels are very high and we expect even average hotel to deliver high levels of service. In most western countries the service levels in the hotels are just about average, so I don’t actually expect high quality service. But when you come across exceptional service in any part of the world, you want to laud it.

Delivering exceptional service consistently requires a lot of work, but being persistent, that the service also gets applauded is a marketing task and I think the Radisson in Jaipur and especially a few of their staff with whom we dealt with did achieve that.

When you give exceptional service, get the customer to give you a testimonial in some form. A good testimonial is a thousand times more powerful than whatever you talk about yourself.

Till next time then….keep delighting your customers and be persistent in taking testimonials.

Carpe Diem!!!

Owls and owlets – perception issues

Marketing

Today I happened to visit the Sultanpur bird sanctuary near Gurgaon. Its a place where a lot of migratory birds, from far-off countries like Russia, Uzbekistan, come during the winter months (Nov-Mar).

Since now its become very hot, most of those birds, return back to their native lands by this time. So we didn’t get to see most of those. However I saw two small spotted Owls and highlighted the same to my family. I am fascinated with Owls. So I immediately noticed them flying.

Our guide however corrected me saying they are owlets. As per my understanding owlets are baby Owls.But our guide was insistent that they were owlets and not owls. But because of my perception that they were owls, my brain didn’t agree till I came back and checked out that while owlets are baby Owls, even those species of owls that are small in size are called owlets.

So what does this have to do with a blog which focus on marketing, human performance and personal finance. In marketing perception is reality. If I think what I am seeing is an owl, even if someone tells me that its an owlet, I don’t believe them. Same way if a customer has formed a perception about something in your product or service, then whatever you say, will not change her perception.

If some other figure of authority says, then, may be they will agree to change, but not otherwise. So you have to be very careful with the kind of perception you are creating with your messaging or your competition is creating on your product, because once made, its very difficult to change.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

A day of marketing challenges

campaign, Marketing, single target market

Today was a very dense day in terms of doing some massive amount of brainwork. Generally my day is full of a lot of transactions which eat up my brain power. Today however was majorly about thinking through a couple of market related problems.

In one situation we had to sit down and physically analyse the database, because there was no response from the database to a campaign we sent. In any campaign, if there’s a problem with the response, then the first thing I like to look at is the database. So after testing multiple messaging when we didn’t get a response, we had to sit down to figure out the challenges with the database. So we went down the list of companies with a comb to figure out what could be the challenge. This was pretty time consuming as well as mentally exhausting.

In the second case, it is still work in progress, I had to analyse on figuring out a single target market for one of the service areas that we deal in. Figuring out a single target market is time consuming because you have to start with the whole market and then keep stripping down. However in this process, you don’t want to miss out on any portion of the market to analyse. So you try to analyse the market from the attributes perspective first, then usage perspective, to ensure that you are not missing out on a lucrative market.

After that you have to see if the market has a decent size for you to operate in. While you have niched down to such a specific market that has only say 100 participants, then the chance of you being able to convert a substantial number is limited. Having said that, this quantity is a relative thing. If you are selling airplanes like a Boeing or Airbus, in any country you may not have more than a handful of airlines. But because the ticket size is so huge that even those handful is a big market.

I shared how in a typical day we analyse the marketing issues. I will look forward to your comments on how you analyse marketing related problems.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

In marketing “failing” is TESTING

Fear, Human Brain, Marketing, Testing

A lot of people in life go about scared of failing. There could be a lot of professions where failing is considered to be a “sin”. In marketing on the other hand if you don’t try different things you won’t know what will work.

You can’t try out different things without failing. If you don’t fail, you can’t succeed in marketing. That’s why in marketing they prefer to use the word testing.

In marketing you have to test everything – from your market, to your message, to your medium.

I have written a lot of posts on the concept of testing in marketing. So why this addition post. Today I was watching a video of Brene Brown on Netflix. I watch this video from time to time.. The video is all about how shame is the primary reason people don’t succeed. Each time I watch, this video, one thing that stands out is that it is the shame of failing that creates the fear in our mind for trying anything.

While I also fall prey to not trying because of fear, I have seen sometimes ,that the thing that I am resisting , is actually what can solve a lot of my problems. But because my brain wants to protect me from the shame, just in case I don’t succeed, it creates this fear inside me.

In early days of human evolution it was the physical fear of getting killed that caused our brains to resist trying something new. But now those kind of things are very few. Its more about ” what people will say” that causes us to not try anything.

While in your life you may decide to take chances or not is your choice. But if you want to succeed in marketing, you will need to test all the time. A lot of the tests will not work, but you learn from them and move forward.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!