Micah Solomon

It’s easy to think up a long list of products you wouldn’t market in a rest room. (Turn it into a parlor game and you could have fun playing it with your snarky friends, even.)

But you’d be scratching your, uh, head a long time before coming up with a product that’s less stall-likely than Cinnabon, a brand so successfully built around the scent of its product. In other words,

Cinnabon’s “gift of aroma and taste,” as the placard I found in the men’s rest room Friday at this Delaware I-95 rest stop put it.

Contextual missteps like this can be significant. Even if you get the space for free (and Cinnabon may have, as a concessionaire to the state), you still pay.

There is an urgency and importance to getting your green marketing right – before customers everywhere become completely cynical.

The solution is straightforward (no, that doesn’t mean easy), according to this watershed post published initially by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog and almost immediately turned into a new lifestyle riff (without attribution, but hey, that’s how you know it’s a watershed) by The New York Times.

Here’s the crux: as marketers, every green message we send out needs to include a number, even if it’s an imperfect number. So here, as published on Seth Godin’s “Seth’s Blog”, is:

The Coming Backlash Over Green Marketing

Micah points us to this campaign from Tumi Luggage. Buy some nylon luggage, they’ll plant some trees (one tree? A bush? It’s not clear how many trees per suitcase). It’s entirely possible that Tumi’s campaign is nothing short of generous, but as a consumer, it’s awfully difficult to tell.

………………………UPDATE………………………UPDATE……………………..

Business Week called Tumi to follow up on this point, and the answers from the Tumi spokesperson aren’t pretty. Surprise: buying nylon luggage doesn’t actually help the planet. Business Week’s phone call shows exactly why the numeric concept (see below) is crucial–Micah

………………………UPDATE………………………UPDATE………………………

{SNIP}

Consumers aren’t stupid (we’re dumb sometimes, but not stupid.) So, when the backlash hits, when every single brand has used up some green angle, then what?

Here’s what’s missing: a number. When you buy a fridge, there’s a big yellow sticker with a number about relative energy consumption. Now, we could argue all day long about how to figure out the right number (should the number on the fridge include data about the amount of energy needed to make the fridge in the first place?) but an imperfect number sure seems better than no number at all.

Drive to Philadelphia: 150.
Take Amtrak: 22.

Stick with the lightbulbs you have throughout your whole house until they burn out: 175.
Replace them all now with something better: 142.

Organic strawberries from California: 88
Frozen strawberries from California: 80
Apple from Dutchess County: 4

Read Seth’s entire post here: sethgodin.com/sg

Who should do the customer service at your company?

(You know that’s a trick question. The answer, of course, is everyone.)

I’m not nuts, though. I don’t mean you have to fire the extreme introvert who has always saved your butt when your computer hard drive fries at 8:43 p.m. I mean that everyone who interacts with customers must do customer service …to the full extent of her aptitude for it.

All the people who work in your organization — at least all the people who should work in your organization — should be skilled at recognizing – and motivated to recognize – customers’ wishes, moods, and motivations.
This only happens when you hire the right people, train them properly, and follow up daily.

Get the entire ebook here, for free

Attention — It’s what your customers crave.

The thing that’s most expensive to give customers—a defect-free product—just gets you in the door. Only human attention, love shown to, your customers is going to buy their loyalty in return. (If you’re making airplane engines, please, please ignore this paragraph. I like a defect-free flight. A lot. Concentrate on that, nix on giving me personal attention. Thanks.)

In many, many industries a large part — significant enough to make a crucial competitive difference — of what you’re selling is attention. This is where the small business has a chance to clobber the big one, where the upstart can get ahead because, well, you’re paying attention.

A great hotel could have the exact same floor plan as the fleabag next door and it wouldn’t matter: it isn’t renting rectangular rooms by the evening. Its business is attention. The Lexus line is significantly similar to the Toyota line but it doesn’t matter. Lexus doesn’t just sell transportation. They very successfully sell attention.

Get good enough at the attention business, and you’re going to get a lot more attention from your banker.

The way gossip spreads on the internet can turn even your “least important” customer into a public relations land mine. Consider the example of Tom Farmer and Shane Atcheson.

They were denied “guaranteed” hotel rooms at 2 AM. They formatted their complaint to the hotel as a bitter (but humorous) powerpoint presentation and sent copies to a couple of friends online, who then sent it along to a couple of their friends, and on and on it spread. Within weeks the hotel had a public relations fiasco on its hands.

….or gold mine. Consider the example of online shoe merchant Zappos.

They provided special help to a woman who couldn’t handle their return shipping procedures in the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death; the good word spread quickly throughout the blogosphere.

Get the entire ebook here, for free