Delivering on the Marketing Promise

[caption id="attachment_67810" align="alignright" width="350"] "community-manager," Creative Commons license. | Credit: Flickr by Enrique Martinez Bermejo[/caption] We all know that promises are made to be kept. And let’s assume that most marketers are intent on delivering the promises they make, even if the promotional wording of those promises may be somewhat exaggerated. The problem is that unless we can truly control every step in the journey from the first promotional articulation through to the timely receipt of the goods or service and payment, Murphy’s law — “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” — may come into play. I remember many years ago making a unique “Act Now: One Day Only” offer for a book club membership drive and being hit by the season’s worst snowstorm at the end of the “One Day Only.” We waited and waited for the response: one day, two days and only on the third day did the mailed orders begin to trickle in. Of course, it never caught up with expectation. Not long ago, a Brazilian marketing company had launched a major campaign for magazine subscriptions using, as a medium, promotional inserts in a bank’s monthly credit card charges’ mailing. The bank promised that 100 percent of its invoices would have the insert. When response was well below tested expectations, it was discovered that only about 60 percent of the promotional pieces had been inserted: Someone in the lettershop had mislaid boxes of the printed inserts and never alerted anyone, lest it slow the tightly scheduled invoice mailing. Had the marketer endured the boredom and personally paid a visit to the facility when the job was being run, a significant and very expensive disaster could have been averted. We have no way of managing the customer’s expectation other than scrupulously delivering what we have promised or even a little more than we have promised — just in case Murphy is hanging around. We all know that one of Amazon’s greatest strengths is its delivery follow-through. It doesn’t only “ask” for — it almost insists — on customer feedback. It carefully monitors every step of the process and listens and responds to comments, whether bouquets or brickbats. Sadly, in my experience, not enough companies listen carefully to the recordings of telephone interactions the law requires them to announce and proactively respond to about customer complaints. We are at a strange time in marketing’s history. We have more tools than ever before, and these allow levels of sophistication not even dreamed of only a couple of decades ago in the age of Addressograph plates and before computers were on every desk. But it seems that the promise of the future — super technology to deal efficiently with all the minutiae of the selling, purchasing and payment processes — often falls short of keeping that promise. The easy thing to do is to blame it on “those lazy, overpaid, long-haired techies” and software that “doesn’t do what they promised it would do.” But, as the saying is, “the fault lies not with the Gods but with ourselves.” As managers of data-driven marketing enterprises or service companies, most of us have come a long way from the days when management by walking around (such as visiting the lettershop facility in the earlier example) was in vogue. That meant actually seeing if what was happening where the real work is done, away from our elegant offices, matches the promising PowerPoint presentations we see in the conference room. Our customers want and need us. They applaud with their purchases, in the convenience and economy of the digital world where everything is immediately available and even better than promised. But for those of us who have left the “reality” down on the shop floor and manage by keeping an eye on our ever-fancier dashboards, it might be good to remember the anecdote about a possible future airline flight whose passengers were told that the flight was historic, the first one to have no crew. The joke about that flight is the announcement promised: “This flight will be flown by a faultless new technology and nothing can go wrong … go wrong … go wrong.” We would do well to make sure that our promises are being kept the old-fashioned way — walking around.

Strategy

Delivering on the Marketing Promise

Peter J. Rosenwald

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Peter J. Rosenwald