The Rubber Duck: Driving Talkable Moments in Your Consumer Experience

This week I’m going to dodge the Oprah/Twitter hype and unfortunate Dominos incident in favor of a little reminiscing. In 2001 I had the pleasure of sitting in on a talk given by Professor Bernd Schmitt as a prospective student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is known for his expertise in experiential marketing, and was sharing the story of an upscale hotel chain that placed rubber ducks in guest bathtubs as a delightful touch to make the stay memorable. The ducks then traveled home with the guests as a reminder of their stay at the hotel, a daily visible cue to return.

Recently I was reminded of this example when asked if companies can truly harness word of mouth as a marketing tool. In a prior post I mentioned that customer satisfaction does not predictably drive word of mouth: customer delight does. For many of us, delight seems a bit ethereal.Savvy brands engineer or amplify delightful “talkable” moments in their customer experience to drive word of mouth. What’s a talkable moment?

The Colonnade Hotel uses rubber ducks to drive word of mouth. What's your duck?

Take a hint from your consumers. How do they describe you to a friend? At the Colonnade Hotel, many guests returned from their pleasing stay and mentioned the unusual rubber duck to their friends. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for rubber duck aficionados, this was copied widely and became less noteworthy. For Virgin Atlantic’s business class passengers, flyers return raving about the posh and entirely unexpected Heathrow Clubhouse with a spa pool. Do many flyers use the pool? No. But it certainly drives word of mouth!

What are triggers of discussion? Let’s use Facebook as an example. I was lunching with a colleague who had just returned from a reunion with her best friends from camp. They lost touch 20 years ago and found each other on Facebook. After hearing her story, I was similarly inspired to track down my best friend from camp, and proceeded to barrage anyone in my vicinity with the story. Was I likely to spontaneously articulate that I find Facebook rewarding because it allows me to connect more deeply with the people and interests in my life? No. Meeting my best friend from camp for drinks thanks to Facebook? Very easy to relate. And often led to a more in-depth conversation on why someone should join.

Amplifying. Can you guarantee that your potentially talkable moments will work predictably on everyone? Well, no. But you can use the insight to increase the odds that each consumer experiences that potentially talkable moment, and measure the outcome. Walk into the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse and you’re greeted by a concierge who will give first-timers a tour of the amenities. Hear a few heart-warming stories in the press about reunions driven by Facebook? What if users were asked to update their status with the most interesting person they connected with? You too may be inspired to give it a go and talk about it.

So, what’s your duck?

Twitter: an interesting channel for WOM but far from a solution

Just how much is a word of mouth platform worth? According to Michael Arrington, $250-$500M. In today’s Tech Crunch, Arrington proffers that the value of Twitter exists in its capability as a search engine for companies seeking to understand what customers are truly saying about them. Google is in late-stage negotiations to purchase the firm. While I agree there is significant value in compiling the emotional, unedited reactions of customers while interacting with your brand, I disagree that Twitter is a perfect WOM solution.

Twitter collects in-the-moment responses to the question “what are you doing?” If I Tweet about difficulty in booking my airline tickets (valuable for the airline to know) I may not reliably follow up on the outcome of my Tweet. “Customer service was great!” The raw moment is revealing, but passive monitoring will not capture the outcome. I might then recommend the airline to a friend online or offline for reasons not captured in my Tweet. The anonymity of Twitter, occasionally likened to MySpace (gasp!), also compromises the value of this data. While a company could certainly collect a volume of comments, there may be limited insight into who is generating the feedback, making findings less actionable. Humorous examples proliferate about tweeting celebrities who aren’t the genuine article. Even an optimist can envision negative or positive WOM campaigns instigated by dishonest companies.

From an aggregation standpoint, many companies currently invest in services that aggregate buzz/feedback from across the web, including Twitter. Is Twitter large enough as a single channel big enough to warrant its own, paid reporting service? Maybe. Quantcast reports 6.1M visitors in March with an astronomical growth rate, yet the sources of traffic indicate a great deal of crawling and suspicious traffic-generating websites. 28% of users visit more than once a month, indicating for 72% of their base, Twitter is not yet a daily utility.

How should Twitter monetize? It shouldn’t discount the apparent business models that have emerged. Twitter has been a boon for companies like Jet Blue (@JetBlue) who have bravely stepped forward to interact with their customers directly. Jet Blue uses Twitter as a customer service and communication platform, interacting directly with over 282K followers and a dedicated team on staff to address questions in real-time. They have benefited from both the direct interaction with customers and the positive brand halo of press coverage as a cutting-edge customer champion. Now countless marketing conferences offer workshops on Twitter and the trade press is abuzz with new lingo to describe messaging in this channel. Why not capitalize on the buzz and charge Jet Blue and similar corporations for providing this significant customer service channel? Surely more bandwith is consumed by corporations and celebrities with hundreds of thousands of followers than the average user? So Twitter, what’s the wait?

Jet Blue uses Twitter for customer service and promotions- and wins.

Are companies afraid to be friendly?

March 27 1:22pm: Update Skype for iphone rumored to be introduced next week. Courtesy of PSFK.

This week I finally crawled out from the rock I’ve been under and downloaded Skype onto my laptop. I had last attempted to use Skype in 2004 to keep in touch with a friend who was consulting in South America, but was frustrated by the microphones and webcams required to make it happen, and a bit daunted by the challenging user interface. Visiting skype.com today it is apparent they have developed a keen sense of their target and aimed to remove barriers to adoption for a much broader audience: you’re greeted by smiling images of families, simple visual navigation, and lots of numbering to lead you from research to using. The site exudes friendliness to a degree only rivaled by a McDonalds Happy Meal or golden retriever.

I am struck by the warm, approachable tone of voice used throughout the communication cycle. After downloading the software, a screen appears that says “we’re glad you’ve joined us” and as the software loads it instructs “take a deep breath.” How reassuring! Very savvy for “new” technology looking to drive adoption beyond their technically-savvy user base. Are companies comfortable using a warm tone of voice? What other brands or categories could use a dose of friendliness?

Any discussion of Skype would be remiss without mentioning their incredible partnership with The Oprah Winfrey Show. What better way to mass market to families than via one of the largest media properties in the world? I’m not privvy to the terms of that relationship, but am impressed by the win-win of enabling Oprah to interact with her audience more significantly, while she’s coined the term “Skyping in” to millions of families on a weekly basis. Amazing.

For those of us who haven’t closed our golden Oprah deal, we should consider the customer’s state of mind when interacting with our companies. Are they anxious or uncertain about using our technology? How can we make the potential points of pain pleasurable, as we move them from research to purchase? A friendly tone of voice in communications may be one tool in our arsenal.

Click on “Comments” below to share your thoughts.

A smiling face greets returning users.

A word about word of mouth

Most marketers agree that positive word of mouth is an important tool to drive growth. Recent studies underscore this importance: An April 2008 study by Zenith Optimedia found that recommendations from family and friends trumped all other customer touchpoints in influencing purchasing behavior. Not surprisingly, social network users are three times as likely to trust their friends and peers rather than advertising when making purchase decisions. However many misconceptions exist. Let’s debunk a few:

1. Your most valuable customers are your most passionate advocates. Logic would follow that your most loyal and lucrative customers are the most satisfied, and therefore would be most likely to recommend. However a 2007 study by V. Kumar and colleagues published in the Harvard Business Review discovered that customers with the highest lifetime value were not the most likely to refer. Instead, a customer’s referral value (the value of the revenue they generate through recommendation) is not significantly related to their traditional LTV. The authors submit that true customer value is a combination of LTV and CRV, and provide examples in Telecom and Financial Services in which their highest tier customers are actually less valuable than a lower-tier customer with high referral value. Kumar confirmed via email that they’ve replicated the findings across a broad array of industries.

2. Customer satisfaction drives WOM.High customer satisfaction ratings do not guarantee word of mouth. As with many human behaviors, eliciting the action requires a trigger. In this case, the disconfirmation of expectations is most likely to result in recommending or dissuading. At Virgin we often used the phrase “surprise and delight,” and in fact both the element of surprise and delight are necessary conditions to drive positive WOM. If you’re in a category with generally high customer satisfaction, such as commercial banking (pre-2009) and e-commerce, it is more challenging to create an experience which defies customer expectations positively. In categories with low satisfaction, such as airlines in the 1990’s, Jet Blue defied customer expectations of the category by offering friendly service and in-flight TVs. This delta between expectations of the category and actual experience was more likely to result in word of mouth.

3. All word of mouth is equal. I’ve attended several meetings over the years where the ambiguous goal “drive WOM” was uttered. In fact, the type of referrer matters. According to a study by Yankelovich, consumers trust friends above experts in product purchases. 65% trust friends, 27% trust experts, and a mere 8% reported trusting a celebrity. There is some variance by category, as studies have found consumers are more likely to rely on expert opinion in technology more so than other categories.

So, a few questions:
1. Do you truly know who your referrers are?
2. Have you designed industry-defying moments into your customer experience? Investing in a memorable positive point of difference may have higher returns than end-to-end “OK” for both products and services.

Click on the word “comment” below to share your thoughts. Next week: profiles of a few exciting new companies that enable word of mouth.

My nomination of the latest jargon we can live without:trimessaging.