Great Work Culture makes for Great Marketing

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My Introduction to Zappos


My brother kept raving about Tony Hshieh, the CEO of Zappos.com. Tony is also the authour of the book, Delivering Happiness. Zappos big claim to fame was starting an online shoe business that laser focused on two things.

1) Creating a happy and loyal work culture.
2) Delivering the best customer service in the world.

And with these two core philosophies, they’ve been able to make over billion dollars in sales.

The number sounds impressive, but my brother was more impressed about how Tony created such an enriching work culture. How is it with hundreds of employees in different departments that it is possible to have a happily united work environment? The answers are in Tony Hshieh’s book Delivering Happiness.

I was given a free copy by Zappos Insights, the branch that’s in charge of helping companies develop a great work culture. And I got the free book by joining my brother on Las Vegas tour. At first I didn’t make much of the tour. This was because I had not read the book yet. But as I walked into their office, I could feel that this was no ordinary place, it almost felt like I was stepping into the world of OZ for corporations. I wouldn’t claim that it’s the happiest place on earth, but the one thing I could feel was that people were content.

That’s not an easy feeling to get when you step into any office. In some offices you can feel the professional tension. You can feel the animosity and secret hatred that people carry with them. But Zappos wasn’t like that, it was relaxing and calm, but professional.

As I walked around one of their buildings, the most consistent thing I could see was the papers posters with the words “Core Value 10: Be Humble.” It was such a simple message that stuck in my head.

I later found out in Tony’s book Delivering Happiness that it was one of the values the company had and would lived by. The companies had many chances to hire some brilliant people that would have made them a lot of money a lot faster, but they weren’t very humble so they didn’t hire them.

Zappos Believes Customer Service is The Best Marketing Tool

What’s been great about Zappos is that they believe in delivering the best customer service. They still have metrics and goals for their customer service calls, but when someone really needs to talk to a representative, or when there’s a problem, they make it as easy as possible to serve them. According to our tour guide she said the longest call they’ve ever taken was 8 hours. And sometimes it’s not even talking about the shoes. A call sometimes is just to let customers vent and make their day just a little bit better. Now that’s a truly socially responsible company.

With all this ranting about a great work culture and so forth, what exactly does this have to do with marketing?

People put tens of millions of dollars into their marketing budgets for their products, but they don’t put in much in terms of human development and investing in their people.

I think great marketing is about being able to create a sustainable marketing campaign that lasts throughout the decades. Even when people look back, they go, “Yes that was an amazing campaign.” Advertisements like 1984 by Apple, or Coke’s use of Santa Claus through the holiday seasons are for the ages, but being known for being the best in customer service in any business is timeless.

When a great work culture is set up it sustains itself for a very long time. And word of mouth about how great a work culture is starts to spread. Just like the idea of Zappos giving $2000 in cash to any employee that wants to quit their job before the end of their training.

Businesses and customers start to pay great attention to the way you treat your staff. They start to pay attention if you’re one of the top 100 places to work for in the country. And when your work culture is fantastic, your employees use that positive energy and pass it on to customers. And when customers get not just good, but exceptional service that delights and surprises, they will tell people. You don’t need an ad to push a message to millions, you just need people sharing their stories about Zappos customer service millions of times a year, for FREE.

Great Work Culture Gets Media to Your Company

All this type of publicity is free, if the proper work culture is set up. Your employees will talk about how wonderful it is. And like a small YouTube ad, it starts to balloon. Eventually when your company develops such a fantastic work culture, then newspapers, and business magazines want to cover you. But I don’t want you to mistaken that it’s an easy thing to do. From my experience turning around a department itself can take six months alone. I would expect it to take 2 years to fully implement an ingrained work culture.

People want to know how CEO’s and their company were able to create such a great work culture. And here’s the thing, a great ad like the Old Spice campaign was bloody brilliant, but two years down the road people will forget about Old Spice.

But 2 years down the road people will still want to know how you were able to build a great company culture. How were you able to maintain it. Great company culture is relevant throughout the ages. It has no expiration date, because being kind and ensuring your employees are happy are timeless endeavours that we all strive for in every moment of our life.

Next time you want to develop a long term marketing strategy, consider developing a great work culture and delivering the best customer service. And I’m sure when you do, you’ll soon hear about the urban legends of your company and then realize they aren’t legends at all. They’re actually true. And then think about the number of people who will talk about your company and the benefits.

What do you believe? Do you feel that a great company culture and customer service can replace traditional ways of advertising and marketing?

The Future of Facebook Marketing (The Way I see it.)

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There’s been a lot of different articles out there about the Facebook Page changes and how they are affecting the way that Facebook marketing is being done. Part of marketing is to be able to look at trends and predict what’s going to happen and to make sure that as marketers we stay ahead of the game.

Spend More to Get the Same Results

1) Facebook will continue to focus on an integrated approach that brings entertainment and social into one sphere. Their emphasis is to get people to stay on their site as long as possible and to defer them away from visiting Facebook Pages of big brands (not in a malicious way but as a byproduct of their new design). They want you to spend more time with those that Facebook has officially partnered with and to enhance Facebook’s brand.

I believe the reason for this is to help drive up ad sales on Facebook. With less power and control by marketers in promoting their page for free, or by gaming the old algorithm, marketers still need to effectively reach their specific audience. Facebook Ads allows you to break down who you want to demographically target.

Be prepared to spend more money on advertising to get the same attention as you did before to get people’s attention on Facebook. After all with the IPO being delayed, don’t be shocked that they are trying to drive up revenue first.

As you can tell from the way Facebook is (at the time that this post is being written) sponsored stories have now moved to the prime real estate spot of the top right hand corner. And this is where our eyes will naturally drift towards.
And if you want to see the new Ticker they have you usually see the Ads first.

Facebook Pages used to be able to rank high in the newsfeeds when Edgerank (the old algorithm) was around, but with the new changes, the best that can happen is that you may barely get into TOP news (unless the user purposely chooses it as a TOP story), or the best chance is that you end up on at the very top of RECENT stories.

Here’s the worst, if your brand becomes too annoying, people can unsubscribe from you but still “Like” your page. Which can screw up what some marketers have used as metrics (which is a crude metric to use to begin with).

How do you not become annoying? Simple, ask your fans on your Facebook what kind of news they want to hear. What would intrigue them so that they are engaged. There’s a lot of talk about being relevant, but sometimes the best way is to simply reach out and ask a few select loyal fans that comment on your page.

It’s not about Engagement, it’s about Intimacy

2) Facebook marketers will need to focus more on intimacy marketing. Too many companies were getting away by bribing people to “Like” their pages and hoping that after they “Like” them that they won’t unlike the page afterwards. It was a bit of a gamble. And after they liked them they would just spam messages instead of getting involved in the conversation. Being able to create intimacy means taking the time to respond to comments to as as many people as possible and adhering to the brand messages.

It’s about starting the dialogue between the people that sincerely want to interact with the brand and the people behind it. And you can’t take that for granted, or else guess what….they’ll unsubscribe you to all your updates.

Aritzia’s Facebook Page does a great job of responding to customers as much as possible. And the number of “Likes” has jumped significantly by over 20% since I finished my social media course at BCIT in May. They are doing something right, and with 50,000 fans.

Key Points:
1) Know that Facebook is moving towards integration of entertainment and interactivity. While they are careful not to alienate brands, they aren’t going to support them as strongly as they have in the past. They want brands to spend for advertising.

2) Get comfortable and start to interact with your customers. And do in a way that you would if you were to service them in an actual store or retail location.

Are You Using Dinosaur Ways to Market Your Restaurant?

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dinosaursI once went to a presentation by the President of Blenz Coffee, George Moen who is a big believer in social media marketing. George offered this piece of advice for any business: If there’s time to spare, use that spare time to market and advertise your business as much as possible.

Marketing for restaurants or any quick service establishment isn’t as simple as printing up business cards, and having people handing out flyers at the door during a slow hours. Marketing requires discipline and understanding the habits of your customers and their use of technology.

Great Restaurant Marketing Depends on Technological Trends:

Much of restaurant marketing depends on the trends of technology and the relationships that customers have with technology. What often happens is that when a restaurant successfully grows it often becomes complacent and uses old forms of media to continue to promote their restaurant.

The belief that what worked in the past must work now can be the killer in restaurant marketing. Think about all the large food chains like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway. They didn’t wait around to adopt to new technology. They didn’t wait around for social media to become big before they jumped aboard.

They saw the trends and decided to learn as much as possible about it, and use it to help market their own eateries. And these companies are going to continue to look for trends in technology and anticipate them to help them make bigger profits.

Look at the Historical Trends of Restaurant Marketing Technology:

If you look at the trends in technology that are related to restaurant marketing, it’s always about the newest way to reach the largest audience in the shortest amount of time possible. But now it’s about reaching the largest relevant audience at the right time. And that’s where today’s restaurant marketing is moving towards.

The first real marketing tool for restaurants was through visuals such as flyers, magazines, newspaper, and posters. This form of marketing technology was often localized and did not have a far reach to start. While newspapers are in heavy circulation, their circulation numbers are dropping. Sadly newspapers and magazines are cluttered with other ads and stories. Even now more newspapers are switching to online to promote their news items.

Then radio came along, and you could advertise your restaurant on the radio to a massive audience that paid attention to that one message at that particular time. All of a sudden things changed. All of a sudden people could be reached that lived miles away from a restaurant and some radio campaigns allowed restaurants to reach a national audience. But those that stuck to just radio advertisement eventually lost a lot of marketing power and audience due to the next great marketing invention, television.

Mass Migrations went from Radio to Television

Television was invented. All of a sudden people could hear, and see people in action. This also gave birth to a whole new industry of the TV commercial, which to this day is still a powerful medium. And TV has been going strong for decades until new generational tastes for how we get our information changed dramatically due to the Internet.

As time passed by and marketers saw the huge potential of globally advertising restaurants for less than what TV would costs, it became the new modern tool to reach billions of people. All of a sudden a whole new generation was switching their medium of choice to find a good restaurant in town through Internet searching, and online peer reviews.

Magazines were seeing a decline in readership due to free articles online, less people were listening to the radio because you could hear podcasts at anytime, people were downloading MP3s, and television was losing out because people could watch whatever they wanted, when they wanted at the touch of their fingertips.

And that’s when restaurant marketing moved massively to the Internet. If you were to look back 10 years ago, it might have been understandable that a restaurant didn’t have a website to market themselves. Now, if you’re a restaurant and you don’t have a website, customers question why there isn’t one? It’s bad marketing and leaves a bad taste in their mouth.

Web 2.0 Kicked Some Serious Ass in Changing Restaurant Marketing

Then the Web 2.0 movement took place. The idea that large collectives of people would share information and connect with each other. People would be able to share reviews of restaurants. All a sudden people didn’t just recommend restaurants through word of mouth, they were recommending restaurants through typing reviews and sharing reviews with a massive network on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and personal blogs and telling their 300 friends. These people were sharing photos on Flickr. All of a sudden your restaurant was part of a community of people whether you liked it or not.

The Internet that was being used at home and at work changed the way that restaurants marketed.
But a greater percentage of people are no longer accessing information on the Internet at home, they’re accessing it through the palm of their hands while they’re walking to their next meeting. Customers are more demanding than ever to get information as soon as possible.

If your restaurant was purely relying to marketing Internet home users, then you’re in a stage where you are using radio to advertise to a TV generation. And this is the mistake a restaurant can’t afford to make. Restaurants must be on top of marketing trends and rely less on less of the old ways of marketing to survive.

What are the Trends in Restaurant Marketing

1) Check in service like Foursquare is continuing to grow in terms of dominating the check in market, and right now they are considered the big players. This is a great tool to use to gain exposure and to encourage people to drop by your location by creating incentives. However if there’s a way to develop a system that can verify that an actual patron was at a restaurant that new platform will rock the restaurant and retail marketing world.

2) Text Marketing- I know you’re probably thinking I’m crazy. But the truth is that mobile text hasn’t really come out on top yet. It’s still it’s infancy stages and now that all the hype has died down, businesses and large corporations are realizing that an economical and great way to reach people is to text them about their restaurant specials.

3) NFC – Near Field Communication is going to be the rage in a few years! As a matter of fact it’s practical applications in the mainstream market have already started using mobile phones. BMO made an announcement about using Mobile PayPass. Now imagine putting up a poster with a sticker so that when people swipe it, it automatically loads to your restaurant’s menu and at the bottom of the menu it has the phone number of your restaurant that people can call in to.

If you’re a restaurant owner and want to learn more about how to use social media to market your restaurant then come hear me speak at Top 5 Social Media Strategies that Restaurants Should Employ. The event is free of charge and happening on Sept 21st at 3pm at Ceilis in Downtown Vancouver.

This post was originally written by myself for the RewardMe Blog and changes have been made with this new posting.