Maybe it's a case of information overload, maybe I've read too much of it over the years, or perhaps I'm just cranky, but so much of what is being written today about marketing bores me to tears. Different people saying the same thing, and few saying at as well as the people who first said it five (Chip and Dan Heath, Andy Sernovitz), ten (Seth Godin), 20 (Tom Peters) or even 30 (Al Ries and Jack Trout) years ago.
That said, one marketing aspect I never seem to tire of is a good customer-relations management story. To me, these are the root of all great marketing and the impetus for the all-important word-of-mouth factor...thus way more important--and weigh more importantly--than a dozen theories.
For example, take the one that started last week when my wife noticed the zipper on her favorite gym top had broken. Seemingly a simple fix, but go try to get one done--tailors hate doing it, the zippers never match, and worst of all, it costs a relative fortune. My garage rag pile is filled with the shredded corpses of much-loved hoodies with broken zippers that cost more to fix than the garment cost me in the first place.
"Where'd you buy the top?" I asked her.
"lululemon," she told me. "About a year ago."
"Well it's a longshot, bring it back to them," I suggested, remembering that it was the only place on earth that ever hemmed a pair of sweatpants for me. "If anyone has a zipper that'll fit, they will."
Well, my wife brought it back, and lululemon REFUSED to change the zipper.
"We could send it back to Vancouver," the perky sales rep explained, "but the carbon emissions associated with flying the garment back-and-forth is environmentally unfriendly."
Hmmm...great excuse. A "no" topped off with a side order of guilt.
So what DID they do instead?
They gave my wife A BRAND NEW ONE!
Let me repeat that in lululemon yellow: A BRAND NEW ONE!
No charge. No questions. Just a smile.
Incredible.
This calls for a lesson in what I call Prism Math, where numbers are distorted:
The top retailed for about $100, which means it cost lululemon --at most--$25.
But here's the distortion: that 25 bucks is worth about $1,000 retail, give or take a few hundred, to lululemon.
Because guess where my wife will go next time she needs ANYTHING gym or yoga or activewear-related?
And when she tells her jaded blogger husband, guess where he pledges to spend his hard-earned dollars next time he needs the same?
And when she wears the replacement top, try to stop her telling the story about it. Which spreads the instant karma that is so lululemon...but really can be anybody's if they were as simple and smart.
So really, I learned two things this week:
1) I learned that $25 = $1,000
2) And I learned that what's truly incredible about marketing is that these stories are still special, not common.
In a perfect world we'd be BORED hearing about hearing how well we've been treated, how the companies we dealt with went out of their way for us, how satisfied we were with our consumer interactions.
So I guess what I TRULY learned this week is why marketing writers still say the same things over and over again...