Why I Didn't Go To Morellis

This morning I had to take in the dry cleaning.  It's one of those chores I don't look forward to as it is somewhat of a luxury and costs money.  However, the experience I have at Premier Cleaners helps soften the blow when I go to pick it up a couple days later.  I'm somewhat of a raving fan or evangelist I suppose when it comes to things I like, and if dry cleaning ever comes up in conversation (rarely) I alway rave about Premier.  Premier does a couple things right.  

1. While I only go in when my basket of laundry is overflowing (about every other month) they always remember my name when I come in.  I think that's pretty impressive.  Wouldn't it be cool if the guy at the burrito joint I frequent on a weekly basis could do that?

2. They give advice and educate me on the best way to clean or dry clean my clothes.  Now, they don't have to tell me how they are going to wash and press my shirts, but with this simple education in dry cleaning I now respect that they take their job very seriously.  

To some, dry cleaning is a commodity.  Coupons can be found anywhere and everywhere.  Premier always just gives everyone 30% off dry cleaning and $1.59 per shirt.  No more coupons for them, they just focus on their service efforts.  I was recently mailed two $5 gift certificates from a local competitor, Morellis.  My wife had taken a comforter there awhile back as that is where her Mom recommended to take it.  Apparently my Premier dry cleaning stories have not been significant enough for her to listen, or she's just tuned me out at this point in our relationship.  At any rate, Morellis hadn't seen us for awhile and sent us the gift certificates.  I thought it was a nice touch, but it just wasn't compelling enough for me to make the switch.  

Wow, I complain about the luxury cost of dry cleaning, but $10 wasn't enough to overcome remarkable service!  That's saying something.

Enjoy Your Living Experience

About a month ago I joined the other members of our executive team at the J.C. Hart Company for a retreat to discuss the "brand" of the company.  These "meetings of the minds" are always a great way to take a step back and really look to see if we are delivering on our purpose, vision, and goal as a company.  Since joining the company back in 2003, we've had 3 of these "executive retreats" and we've always come away with an improved vision for the company.

As I said, at this most recent retreat we wanted to review our "brand."  After going through a few exercises discussing our "touch points," watching the Fish! Philosophy video (the 5th time for me), sharing some good and bad customer service stories, and reviewing our company Core Values, we came to the conclusion we really like the direction we've taken the business.  However, we also concluded that the message or "brand statement" we share at our "touch points" just wasn't sticky enough.  While our Purpose is "We make your Home and enjoyable living experience," this doesn't just roll off the tongue in everyday conversation.  So we've taken our first step in improving the way this message is sent.  First, for marketing purposes we shortened our Purpose into a "brand statement":  Enjoy Your Living Experience.  It's a start, and our associates are excited about the message.  We've always been a management company that is known for customer service, but our goal is to take it to the next level.

But none of this is really why I'm writing this post.  Since rolling out "Enjoy Your Living Experience" I feel like customer service has become a hot topic for many others in the marketing world.  For Jay Ehret it's something he does everyday, but for Jeremiah Owyang it's not his usual expertise.  This is why I love following these guys and others on Twitter.  Not only do they share great blog posts, but they also make great observations and share them with the Twitter community.  Before Twitter and blogs we'd make business decisions and hope they took us in the right direction, now we can just do a Twitter or Google search and find out if another company has already tried our idea.  Better yet, we can write a blog post or tweet and get feedback on our idea from a plethora of experts.  By using these tools we can all make better business decisions and ideally become better businesses.  I certainly am enjoying my living experience since branching out into social media and I thank all of you that share with us your ideas, knowledge, and expertise.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your day.

What's the Lifespan of Social Media/Web 2.0?

Do You List or Advertise

On a number of occasions I have had discussions with my peers, vendors, and colleagues in regards to what is considered an advertisement. In my industry a majority of marketing dollars are spent on "listings". "Listings," by my definition, are marketing dollars spent to post your product or company on a website, guide, or book that puts you right along side your competition. A "listing" also provides essentially the same information and format to display your information as your competitors. I do not consider "listings" advertising or advertisements. They are a necessary evil that unfortunately eat up a majority of my marketing budget in the apartment industry. Advertisements in my opinion are a marketing choice that allows your company or product to be creative, develop a brand, or have unique placement.

I feel in my industry we have allowed the "listing" companies to disguise themselves as advertisements and we pay too high of premiums to utilize these glorified yellowpage ads. And it doesn't seem to stop. A new online "listing" service comes on board all the time. As an industry why do we accept this? How do these listings help to separate you from your competition? All these listing services do is treat our communities and apartments as a commodity. We're not commodities, and we need to stop marketing like we are.

Develop great websites for your properties/companies, blog about them, provide outstanding customer service, build unique and distinctive communities/products/services, find your branding niche and exploit it, don't settle for listings as your main form of marketing. Everyone's in the yellowpages, but your company message needs to be more than just a phone number as that's what everyone else is doing. Dare to be different! Listing are a necessary evil while advertisements are a marketing choice.

Search Engine Optimization

So I am completely overwhelmed by the whole SEO thing. Wow, who knew how much really went into this. It really takes experts to manage, optimize, and monitor SEO, or does it? Today I had a conference call with HubSpot.com. They advertise themselves as an Internet Marketing company. I Googled "Internet Marketing" and they did come up on the 1st page, but not as the 1st listing.

What they showed me today in a webex conference call was pretty good. They have software that measures your website optimization vs. up to 20 other competitors based on keywords. That alone was pretty sweet. Then they utilize this data to make recommendations for improving your website and helping to promote or create all the other links and online posts you need to improve your SEO. In 45 minutes I was impressed, and they really just scratched the surface I felt. This is the 1st SEO tool I've seen that really seems to measure and help.

If you have used HubSpot.com or know anything about them please feel free to comment. I'll also share this link to another blog with some comments so you can see what others are saying.