Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services—from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants—are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger–like buzz.
—Tom Peters
Buzz and word-of-mouth are two of the most effective ways of getting the word out about your products and services. Both depend on genuine enthusiasm and interest on the part of consumers and can light a fire, creating interest and loyalty for a company’s brand and products that’s long-lasting and contagious. Buzz can be both positive and negative. Get your positive messages out there consistently to build interest in your brand and products, and be on the lookout for and neutralize negative buzz as quickly as possible.
It’s no longer enough to just have a marketing plan for your company. In today’s fast-changing world of communications, how we interact with our current and potential customers is critical. Social media allows companies to interact with and engage customers in new and powerful ways. They make it possible to both listen and speak. In this chapter, we explore how companies can use social media and other vehicles to build relationships and reinforce their reputations in good or difficult economic times.
Go to any business school, and you’ll be taught about the importance of marketing and promoting your company, your brand, and your products and services. And when you dig in a bit deeper, you’ll learn that advertising is an important part of the marketing mix—the different approaches that an organization takes in marketing and promotion. While advertising can be an important part of any company’s strategy, I believe that before you start booking ads, it’s important to first understand the answers to two questions: “What kind of advertising do you need?” and, “When and where can you get the biggest bang for your buck?”
Within the banking industry, our products are for the most part commodities. Every bank has checking accounts, every bank has loans, and every bank will accept your deposits and cash your checks. They all do the same thing. Bank products may come in different colors and may offer slightly different rates, but there’s no amazing product in banking that separates one bank from another. And even if one came about, everybody else would quickly copy it.
So how do you advertise that?
In fact, when the larger banks advertise their products and services, they’re also advertising for my products and services, and for those of every other bank, large, small, or in between. If, for example, Bank of America spends a few million dollars to advertise the virtues of its mobile banking program, it’s advertising for me and all other banks because customers assume that every bank offers mobile banking. I realize that advertising is an effective tool to build brand awareness, and perhaps in many industries it’s where a marketing budget should be focused. However, for promoting a commodity product like banking, it’s often a waste of scarce marketing dollars. The exception is when you have a unique service or product like Apple’s iPhone, where advertising helps build a company’s competitive gap.
There’s so much noise in the world today—we’re all constantly being bombarded by messages from the media, from advertisers, from our online friends, and much more—that a lot of advertising simply gets lost. As a result, you’ve got to ask yourself what you’re trying to do with your advertising, because it’s not inexpensive—especially for a small business.
I’ve made the comment publicly that I believe bank advertising is dead, and I have to admit that I get some funny looks when I say that. What I mean is that there are plenty of ads that banks run on television showing warm scenes of kids hugging their grandparents, with the tagline, “Come down and open a checking account at such and such bank.” How many people do you think actually say after seeing one of these ads, “Let’s run down to the bank and open up a checking account!” I think it’s fair to say that it happens very rarely, if at all. Sure—some brand awareness might come out of them, but that’s about it.
For most people, when it comes to where they decide to take their banking business, it’s all about interest rates or convenience—which bank is located close by and which bank offers the highest interest rates on deposits and the lowest rates on consumer and commercial loans and mortgages. So if I put a very attractive savings account interest rate in the paper that’s way above the competition, I’m going to get more business than I know what to do with. By succumbing to this tactic, however, I’m agreeing to compete with price or rates—to reinforce my position as a commodity. Unless you’re a big-box retailer where this is part of your value proposition, you’ve just put your company in a death spiral that you’ll be hard-pressed to escape. You can’t compete on price alone; it isn’t a sustainable strategy.
Becoming a commodity isn’t a recipe for long-term success in banking or in any other industry or business. I’m much more interested in creating real value for our customers and then building buzz about our bank.
We started using buzz in our own marketing well before social media came on the scene. What I mean by buzz is creating word-of-mouth. At Umpqua, our company is built around creating extraordinary customer experiences that inspire buzz and word-of-mouth from our customers every day. Our associates are trained to go above and beyond to serve their customers. And we empower them to go out in public to create excitement in unexpected ways—we call them random acts of kindness. These random acts can include anything from surprising a group by paying for their lunch or dinner, to giving flowers or picking up the tab for a line of people waiting to order coffee. This creates buzz—people talk about the bank and our great associates, and word spreads through family, friends, and work associates.
We also teach our associates that if things go wrong during the course of a client transaction, they’re empowered to do whatever they have to do so the client either leaves our store or hangs up the phone satisfied—not frustrated or angry. We want to turn what could be a negative situation into a positive one because negative customer situations can easily mushroom. The resulting negative buzz can be extremely destructive to a business, so we do our best to identify and resolve any problems while constantly seeking opportunities to generate positive buzz about Umpqua Bank in both traditional (television, radio, newspapers) and social media outlets.
Now, with the reach of social media, negative buzz has the possibility and capability to be much more powerful than positive buzz. One reason word-of-mouth is so successful is that people like to tell others about their experiences, both good and bad. We’ve all heard that people will tell ten friends about a good or bad experience they’ve had, and those ten will tell ten others, and so forth. Because of the power of social media, they can now post their experience on Facebook or Twitter or Yelp, multiplying their reach many times over.
Good reports on social media can be terrific and help new customers find your business. Bad news can also take off and in some cases can prove to be the kiss of death for a business that may have made just one unfortunate misstep. While not a literal kiss of death, Netflix (with its 2011 decision to spin off its DVD operation into a new business, Qwikster) and Bank of America (with its 2012 decision to institute new checking account fees) are two recent examples of where social media forced the companies to change course and make customer-centric decisions.
And don’t forget: once bad buzz is out there, it’s very hard to undo. Negative buzz is sticky.
To ensure we don’t get stuck in the web of negative buzz, we have people at Umpqua who are assigned the task of listening. They’re constantly monitoring social media for comments about Umpqua Bank in order to respond to the comments as quickly as possible. If we see that a customer had a problem and this bad experience is on, say, Facebook or Twitter, we apologize and encourage that person to give us a call so we can address that problem. And we don’t stop there. We also reach out to that customer’s local store and have that store manager call him or her personally to address the concern and, when appropriate, send a note or gift as a special thank-you. Because of this responsive, hands-on approach, many of these same customers go right back out on Facebook or Twitter and share the experience: “Wow, you won’t believe it, but these guys called me and got this thing fixed. I love them!”
Negative buzz is all around us. Just turn on the TV and you’ll see plenty of it; do a Google search for information about a specific company, and you’ll encounter plenty more. That’s a threat to any company, and it’s especially unfortunate when the negative buzz is undeserved. The other side of the coin is that if you can create enough positive buzz or word-of-mouth about your business, it can often mitigate the effect of the negative. People expect most businesses to provide customer experiences that aren’t particularly noteworthy, so when a restaurant or a store or a bank does something above and beyond the norm, people notice, and the word gets out.
This is exactly what happened when the Winston-Salem, North Carolina–based Krispy Kreme doughnut chain arrived on the West Coast of the United States. Krispy Kreme, founded in 1937, was for most of its history geographically limited to the southeastern United States. Its fans, many of whom had grown up on the sugar-coated, deep-fried doughnuts, were noted for their rabid loyalty and devotion to the company’s products. In 1996, after a group of franchisees bought back the company from Beatrice Foods (which had bought Krispy Kreme in 1976 after its founder died), Krispy Kreme began a national expansion.1 Buoyed by its fanatical customer base, the company became a genuine sensation, generating massive amounts of buzz with each new store opening, proven by the long lines of cars at their drive-up windows all waiting for their freshly made doughnuts.
Unfortunately, Krispy Kreme is also an example of what happens when a company generates negative buzz. The company expanded too quickly, placing its products everywhere it could, including supermarkets, convenience stores, and even casinos. Quality suffered. Not only that, but profit projections were missed, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated, the company’s stock price plunged, shareholders sued, and average weekly sales fell. Krispy Kreme’s fans turned on the company in droves, generating huge negative buzz in the process. In 2005 the company’s CEO, Scott Livengood, was replaced by Stephen Cooper, who decided to retain his other job just in case—as interim CEO of Enron.2
Positive buzz is a significant factor in marketing a business, and building positive buzz goes back to key questions: how you differentiate yourself, how you stand out, and what your culture is built of. If you can build a process within your company, whether you’re small, medium, or large, that creates word-of-mouth describing why the way you do business is different and better than your competition’s, that’s inherently much more powerful and effective than general advertising. People put more credence in the personal testimonies and experiences they hear from their friends or from other “regular” people. It’s our hope that the positive buzz we create will lead to these personal testimonies and endorsements from happy customers.
Of course, personal testimonies shared just through advertising are overused and less believable. How many times have you seen a television advertisement for a car dealer that features a happy customer gushing about what a great deal she got and how wonderful the salespeople were? Because every car dealer does that, and it’s so commonplace and uneventful, people rarely pay attention to what those happy car customers are saying. This is not buzz. To create positive buzz, you’ve got to be saying or doing something that inspires others to share it on your behalf.
Forbes contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas detailed how to launch a word-of-mouth and buzz campaign the Apple Way, using Apple Computer as an example of a company that has “grasped the art of WOM and buzz campaigns that have certainly contributed to its phenomenal success.” According to Mourdoukoutas, here’s how Apple runs its word-of-mouth and buzz marketing campaigns:
Social media can be a tremendous positive boost for a business, but it can also be a huge negative if it goes unmonitored or if you choose to be unresponsive to people’s problems with your organization. Sometimes you’ve just got to say, “We screwed up, and we’re very sorry for that. Come on in; we want to make it right.” Turning a negative impression into a positive one can not only correct a bad situation but also create a new fan—someone who will tell their family and friends about what a great company you’ve got.
When we say that you are best at delivering your message, it’s not just the owner or the leader or the CEO of a business—it’s everyone who works for you. If an associate in your company truly believes in what you’re trying to do—your products and services, your standards, your ethics, your core values—and is passionate about your organization, think about the power of that. Now multiply that by the number of people in your organization, and you have the power to move mountains.
When people in the field are creating buzz, the buzz that results is much more powerful than the buzz generated by owners or leaders or CEOs. This is because people look at the managers and executives and say, “Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” And it’s true: if you own or lead the business, of course you’re going to say it’s great. But if I’ve got ten people who work for me and they’re out there saying the same thing, people think, “Wow, these people really do like this company.” The impression left with the public is much more positive when your own people are saying good things about your company.
Your associates don’t become evangelists for your business by accident. If you have the right culture, empower your people, hold them accountable, let them have fun at work, and make them feel good about their jobs, then they’re going to want to tell people what a great business they work for.
Guy Kawasaki served for a number of years in the position of chief evangelist at Apple Computer. According to Kawasaki, hiring right is an important part of this process. Says Kawasaki, “Look past the ‘perfect’ candidate. Ignore the irrelevant. Find the people who believe that your organization can change the world, who use the product. Although I wouldn’t have hired me, and still might not today, I was a good candidate for Apple because I was a zealot for the product. Follow your gut: Only hire someone you would enthusiastically run up to if you saw them from a distance. Hire better than yourself.”4
Owners of businesses who focus on their people and getting them excited about the company they work for can create great waves of success for their organizations. And if the wave is large enough, the media will jump onboard. The media loves stories about companies that are doing something different from the rest of the pack and succeeding at it. Once they pick up on the story, it can take on a life of its own, which can be worth its weight in gold.
I think corny is good. It stands out. In my experience, people take many of the things in life for granted. For example, I go out to my car, I turn the key in the ignition switch, and I expect the car to start. If it doesn’t, I might be late for an important appointment, or I might leave someone stranded at the airport. If I walk into my house and flip on the light switch, I expect the lights to go on. If the lights don’t go on, then I won’t be able to find my way around the house and might trip on a chair that I’m normally able to avoid when the lights are on. I take it for granted that my car is going to start when I want it to and that my lights are doing to turn on when I flick the switch. These are routine expectations we all have, and most of our waking hours are filled with a long series of such routine expectations that weave the normally uneventful backdrop of our lives.
So when something pops out of that normally uneventful backdrop, people sit up and notice. This is the case when you do something unusual or corny.
One of the first things I did when I came to Umpqua Bank in the mid-1990s was to create some deliberately odd television advertising to help the bank stand out from the crowd and get people to notice us. And it wasn’t just corny; it was really corny—and funny. The star of these ads was an orangutan that made funny noises while an announcer did a voiceover describing the virtues of banking with Umpqua Bank. We put televisions in the lobbies of the six locations we had at the time and ran those videos nonstop every day. Even now, when I travel to southern Oregon, customers tell me that they still remember those ads with the orangutan. Why? They were unexpected, a surprise and corny!
People also tend to remember the small things. That’s why I don’t believe in the statement, “Don’t sweat the details; just worry about the big stuff.” I don’t believe that. I think you do need to sweat the details because it’s the details that allow the big things to happen.
There are plenty of examples of advertising that’s both corny and memorable. Consider the Aflac duck. In case you’re not familiar with Aflac (though I’m sure you have seen and remember its television star duck), the company is the nation’s largest provider of supplemental insurance to individuals and groups. Much in the same way that I decided to use an orangutan in my early ads for Umpqua Bank, Aflac decided to use a duck in its advertising. That duck is irritating and obnoxious, but it’s also so corny and funny that we remember it. In fact, the duck has taken on a life of its own, far beyond the insurance that Aflac sells. The company has created a duck gear store (www.duckgear.com) where you can buy Aflac-branded plush ducks, duck pillows, duck golf club head covers, hats, umbrellas, and much more. And Aflac has sold millions of these items.
Corny works, and so does the unexpected. If a client had a bad experience with the bank and I as company CEO sent the client some flowers to apologize, that person would certainly appreciate the gesture. But if one of my associates in that store sends that same bouquet of flowers along with a personal note, it results in an even better impression with our customers. Why? Because banking clients don’t expect the people in the field to perform random acts of kindness. They expect these gestures to come from the higher-ups. When you empower people at lower levels in the organization to surprise and delight your customers, you can create the power of the unexpected, which in difficult times can help you build the momentum you need to carry you forward into better times.
Notes
1. Kate O’Sullivan, “Kremed! The Rise and Fall of Krispy Kreme Is a Cautionary Tale of Ambition, Greed, and Inexperience,” CFO (June 1, 2005), http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/4007436.
2. Ibid.
3. Panos Mourdoukoutas, “How to Launch a WOM and Buzz Campaign the Apple Way,” August 7, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2011/08/07/how-to-launch-a-wom-and-buzz-campaign-the-apple-computer-way/.
4. “The Evangelist’s Playbook,” Success, May 12, 2013, http://www.success.com/articles/1112-the-evangelist-s-playbook.