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Gasoline/electric, sandal/shoe, chocolate/peanut butter, labradoodle?

These are all products that boast the best of both worlds. I’m not on board with the sandal shoe yet. I like to wear socks with my shoes, but not with my sandals. If I’m going back to the car or house to slip off my socks and leave the top of my shoe behind, I’m probably just going to slip on a different pair of sandals or stay at home if it’s that hot. Peanut butter and chocolate go together. It’s poven in many medical and scientific journals of the 20th century. The car is a huge deal because we’re hoping it’s a transition to an even greater car. It’s a temporary fix to a permanent problem. It’s the best we have to offer, for the time being.

Now what about the labradoodle? I want to know who came up with the idea of “designer dogs”. I’d say this is the most effective marketing I have been exposed to in the last five years. Adorable names, loving pets and whether or not the intentions were there, a plus for the environment and the world.

At first, I thought this is merely a deceitful campaign to get people to pay top dollar for a mut. And maybe that is all it ever was, but how is it impacting the industry? People are obviously paying more for a dog they could previously have picked up at the animal shelter. I know there is some debate about how the dog’s upbringing has impacted the dog as well, so for the sake of argument I’ll retract that last statement and say people are paying more for a dog today than they would have paid for the same dog 10 years ago.

There is a fine article I found online that tracks the behavioral changes of the American Kennel Club on the idea of the Goldendoodle. The title gives away much of what to expect here, but the details are interesting - “American Kennel Club to soon register mixed breed dogs”.

Obviously the AKC, A governing body that regulates the rules relating to dog registrations, is going to be disgruntled about such a decision to market dogs that are not of pure breed whereas previously you would pay more for an AKC registered pure breed dog. They regulate the breeds that will be accepted into the club and license certain breeders who meet standards of being an official AKC breeder. This is all primarily in the name of dog shows and anyone who wants to show off such a fine animal they own, but it helps keep things humane for the dogs as well.

There is such an increasing demand for designer dogs, that the AKC has reversed their stand on the topic. They realize it will be more profitable for them to admit these new hybrids into the fold. Not everyone will be able to buy an AKC registered Pookimo, but anyone who picks up a half Poodle, half American Eskimo, will tell everyone that they do own one. The only reason we have 160 different breeds currently recognized by the AKC is because over time, different breeds have met different breeds. A registered dog has only kept change out of the lineage for a little while. You can research any dog breed to find that out. English Bulldogs are the unfortunate biproduct of the purebread concept. They went from a dog that fought bulls to a health-stricken mascot of choice. Psychologically there may be a deeper rooted issue as to why we display an animal that we have totally clamied dominion over as such a popular mascot. They can’t even multiply without our help anymore.

These new hybreeds offer the child-friendly temperment of one breed with the shedless coat of another or any combination of size and color. It makes sense to believe we will see a drastic reduction in the number of wild or stray dogs here in th US. People will think twice before discarding such a hot commodity.

Marketing with Virtue,

Harry Acosta
Sole Proprietor
Sylph, Llc.
sylph@woway.com
sylphmarketing.com

I had an issue with a credit card company last month where a payment I had made hadn’t registered on their website. Anyone who has noticed this themselves from comparing statements knows the slight amount of excitement you get when you’ve caught an error that will end with you having more money. It’s like finding money in the wash. That feeling subsides though, the longer you are placed on hold.

In this particular case, I was not on hold for very long. As soon as I was done with the maze of prompts, the very same that I would momentarily be asked to speak into the phone, I got a person on the other end - Great! As soon as I heard her voice, I realized she was young, eager to help and there would be some miscommunication. She wasn’t reading from a script, and she seemed to understand me just fine. I was the problem. I couldn’t understand her very well.

I’ve seen it countless times in movies and even in real life, people raise their voices so the receiver of the message can better understand them. This works well with my parents as they are hard of hearing, but it doesn’t work well when it is an issue with the language being spoken and you are the one who cannot understand the message. Well fortunately for me, I’m not like that. I speak loud enough as it is, and I pride myself on being articulate.

I explained the indisrepency I had noticed on my bill and she tried to explain what we were going to do to get to the bottom of it. I caught most of what she had to say and was able to fill in the rest as if I were trying to read a loving note from my son when he was 5. There were some awkward pauses, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So I pretended to understand what I couldn’t make out. I did finally understand that she wanted to transfer my call - Noooooo! Please don’t transfer me. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be a better listener. You know what, maybe those $50 aren’t that important. I’m just going to hang up.

Why was I conditioned to dread the idea of being transferred away from her? She and I didn’t have any rapport. In some cases I’ve known people to hang up when they don’t get a representative they like. They will just call again in the hopes of speaking to someone different. But I didn’t want to speak to anyone different. I wanted to work things out with her. There’s got to be a way we can come to an understanding.

She said she was going to transfer me over to someone in the IT department. “Please, don’t make me explain my situation again to someone else.” I actually said this. “If you transfer me, they’re just going to transfer me back to customer service, back to you.” She explained that she wasn’t able to help me any further and I was going to be transferred. I didn’t have any say in the matter. She was going to transfer me to some IT geek who had no people skills and would treat me like I was stupid.

The line rang twice and as soon as I heard the young man answer I realized he spoke perfect English, we were going to get to the bottom of this and I was indeed stupid. It was the most pleasant conversation I had ever experienced over the phone with a stranger. He knew what had happened. He knew how to lead me to understand too. He made me realize it was my fault and he explained to me as if I were his equal what to do in the future. How did I have to get transferred to IT in order to experience such amazing customer service?

Yesterday I was at Subway and experienced a similar issue with the Sandwich Artist. He could understand me just fine, but I wasn’t sure what he was asking me. I felt better about it as the people in line behind me all made the same mistake I did. We pretended to understand him, but gave no response out of embarassement. Each one of us made him say “Do you want it toasted?” over again.

I’m not writing to poke fun at these employees, rather the situation. I’m not trying to say I’m an American and they need to have an American speaking representative on the other end of the phone or making my food. There are plenty of English speaking Americans I can’t understand either. What I’m trying to covey is that many businesses spend a lot on marketing and branding. They want consumers to have a certain outlook on a brand. They want potential clients to feel a connection between their product or service and themselves. Once that has been established, maintaining a relationship with the consumer is often overlooked. The first contact with a real person involved with the company is often alienating.

I don’t fault the employees. They are who they are and they need jobs. I fault the culture of the business who puts that little amount of emphasis and funding into a role or department that may be the only open line of communication they ever have. As business owners we need to ensure we are consitantly represented down the line. These are situations where word of mouth negates the inspiring ad camapign that made them think of us in the first place. It doesn’t have to be a horrible experience to make someone not want to deal with a business again. If we make it uncomfortable or we make them feel like they are the problem, they won’t be back.

Marketing with Virtue,

Harry Acosta
Sole Proprietor
Sylph, Llc.
sylph@woway.com
sylphmarketing.com

Who has time for that, right? Well you should make time. Just as soon as you’re done reading this, stay right where you are, and see what results you get when you type your name into Bing.com.

When a company’s name is substituted for the action made while using the product, or in some cases another product - that is called brandverbing. (i.e. When you’re done Xeroxing that Kleenex®, I need you to Fedex® it over to Velcro®, while I finish my Coke® and Google® Boy George to see if he took part in Band-Aid®.) All of these trademarked words are used in a general manner often enough that they run the risk of losing their intellectual property rights of their trademarks. Some already have. We have taken Xerox, FedEx and Google one step further by replacing verbs with these words.

People have been Googling themselves for years, but now my TV tells me it is time to Bing. I gave Bing a shot or two, but didn’t see much of a reason to switch my service as it were, so I kept Googling. Now I think it is time to do an in-depth taste test of the two.

First I’d like to note I’m a little bias against Microsoft. I still like to think that during their last campaign battle with Mac, that Mac won - and that Mac should cool it already. They bested the giant monster for the time being, now move on. In this battle, Google and Microsoft are both giants. Still I find myself defending Google in the news and siding with it more often than Microsoft.

That being said, the Bing campaign is beautifully done. It doesn’t want to mention any names, but it recognizes our frustration with search engines and offers a solution at Bing.com. The ads are clever and professional and funny enough not to be irritating. The commercial caught my attention the first time I saw it, although I had to watch it a second time to really grasp it. They recognize that we “Google” and again without any stone throwing, offer us a chance to “Bing and decide” and prevent search overload. My favorite spots of the campaign are Bing Search Overload: Pregnant and the Getting You What You Want Faster spot during a Daily Show episode.

The ads compelled me to check it out for myself. The site however, did not keep my attention. I tried a few searches and decided this doesn’t really offer me anything new. Yes there are pretty pictures and some fun facts to digest, but I think those are only there so I remember what site I was using when I got the same results as Googling.

It wasn’t until I was talking to a colleague about my distaste for the worthless, search results on Google that no one ever clicks on and are only paid for because “We can’t allow our competition to have that space all to themselves”, that I thought to myself I should give Bing a more thorough investigation. I didn’t notice much of a difference the last time I searched for something, so this time I searched for something I knew more about - me.

Bing came out strong. 5 of the 10 results posted on the first page were a direct hit. The first 4 results were all about me even though one was a duplicate result. It wasn’t until page 3 that I found result number 6 which was a race result from 2002, where my father Harry Acosta had also run, so double threat.

Google fell short of that. On the first 3 pages, 21 of 30 results pointed to a Harry Acosta, but only two pointed to me. On the first page, just one result for me and it was an outdated page of a website I had revamped months ago. I was able to make a note of it for the next person who may google me, which could be any minute now. All in all, pretty lousy results especially if the information I uncovered on one of the results is true. WhitePages.com informed me that “There are 13 unique ‘Harry Acosta’ full names in the United States”. We could start a baseball team! With that you’d think I’d be all over these pages. What was all over these pages? Paid search results and nine results for Harry Potter. The search overload ads were right. Harry Acosta provided more results for Harry Potter than for me.

Now what about those paid search results? On Bing, there were paid search results but they hadn’t yet hidden them amongst the rest of the real results like some sites have done. Google even had paid results show up for other search engines like Ask.com when I Googled Bing. I’m sure Bing is on track to catch up.

My results are best summarized thusly - Binging Bing:

“Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.”

Googling Google Result:

“Google. Advanced Search · Preferences · Language Tools · Advertising Programs - Business Solutions - About Google. ©2009 - Privacy.”

I think Bing wins with their marketing campaign. It did it’s job and I tried it out. For the time being they have a better approach to finding things online too. Searching for images had a nice feel with a few more options as well. Their maps didn’t take you right to my doormat, but zoomed in just enough for me to recognize that it was taken in spring ‘08.

From a marketer’s standpoint, I hope Bing takes off. From the consumer’s point of view it is not Web 3.0. The difference between the two is not great enough for people to switch over. Fortunately for Microsoft, most people will not need to. As a matter of fact, people with Internet Explorer will have to actively change back from Bing as their default search engine to Google.

Time will tell what we can expect. Who knows? Maybe we’ll be Asking ourselves in the future.

Marketing with Virtue,

Harry Acosta
Sole Proprietor
Sylph, Llc.
sylph@woway.com
sylphmarketing.com

I received an email today that alerted me of some reward points I can cash in for an account that I have. I decided to go ahead and click through to see what my options were as I was pleasantly surprised at how many points I had accumulated. I was even more delighted to realize 20,000 points weren’t totally worthless.

20,000 points, which I think took me roughly 5 months to accumulate, would get me a fifty dollar gift card or other items valued around there. I don’t have to spend anything more and there were no charges to receive this gift. I was aware of this program when opening this account, but it didn’t sell me on the account. I was all ready to sign up anyway. What this has done is assure me that it is beneficial for me to do business with this company and make me feel like I have made a good decision.

I am the kind of consumer that re-evaluates my accounts on a regular basis to see if I could have it better somewhere else. I’m not shopping for insurance every 6 months, but if I find a charge on a statement that I was not expecting, I make a mental note of it. If it happens again, I research the difference between the service I thought I was receiving and for what I am actually paying.

Even if I have a clear understanding of the agreement at that point, I will start looking for a service that offers what I thought was once mine. I do have a limited amount of patience when it comes to searching for alternatives. Obviously the internet is key for quick searches. If it is still difficult to find any other options, I’ll abandon the idea for the time being. Still, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, I could have it so much better.

I think back to the first digital camera I purchased over 10 years ago. It was a $500 Olympus. I bought it so I could research this new technology, and as an added bonus, I had 30 days to return it. That was a big selling point for me at the time because I was a student and because I didn’t have to concern myself with being out that much money and stuck with a bad decision.

It was great. I still have some of the pics from that camera on my computer today. Ahh, but that was the catch I wasn’t aware of at the time. I needed a computer. Well a roommate had one of those, so I’d just load what I had taken on there and transfer it to disk for later use. It seems archaic now, to think that I would even purchase a digital camera when I didn’t have a computer, but I wasn’t aware enough of where the technology was taking us.

Digital cameras were marketed to me as a way for amateur photographers to eliminate the waste of film. You could get a preview of the pics and delete the ones you did not want. With that in mind, I thought I was purchasing a camera that housed film and transferred the digital images that I accepted to film. That was not the case. So as I was showcasing the new technology that I wielded it became very evident to me and everyone I spoke to, that it really was a waste for me to have this camera without a computer.

Now the idea of what I thought I was purchasing, that I had clearly convinced myself of, had me thinking what if I could have it so much better with another camera? So I started to do research on other cameras to see which had this great technology. I wasn’t too happy to find that none of them did, so I returned my camera and paid my rent with the refund. There was no harm done and I was able to properly educate myself on the uses of digital cameras and how a computer was necessary. Please keep in mind that this was over ten years ago, before you could walk into your neighborhood drug store and load a disk into an instant photo printing machine.

Now I was young and my expectations got the better of me in that instance, even though it did work out for me. I learned a free lesson. Over time, I have become a consumer who researches more and buys impulsively less.

As marketers, we love to take advantage of all of the great selling points of our products. We try to build up confidence in the product for the consumer. Too often though, we miss the mark on informing consumers what they can really expect, especially when it comes to technology; and especially when it comes to attracting older consumers who may be weary of what they are purchasing. Remember, they have been taught by us to be weary. Because we advertise everything as being so great and easy - even when it is not. They’ve been burnt before. They need reassurance that they really could have it so much better.

Marketing with Virtue,

Harry Acosta
Sole Proprietor
Sylph, Llc.
sylph@woway.com
sylphmarketing.com