The title of this post is a snowclone of the title of a book on investing, published in the late 1990s. Writing before the dot-com crash, the author talked about the importance of, not buying, but selling stocks at the right time, at the right price, so as to realise profits. Amid the dot-com frenzy, he delivered a sanguine message that if you did not sell in time to appropriate the cash, it did not matter how high the stock price went.
Back to the post.
Communities and conversations are at the core of Web 2.0. Profitable businesses are harder to come by. When they do, they do so using principles, which can best be described as Web 1.0 or even pre-Web.
Pre-web, my first post-MBA job was in a cosmetics firm in India. In the summer when I began, the company launched a product, India’s first one to be sold as a ‘sunscreen’. Our competitor, Hindustan Lever, had a similar product, but it was sold as a ‘fairness’ cream. The ‘sunscreen’ position in the consumer’s mind was ours for the taking. The print and TV advertisements were aspirational and sophisticated. The demand sky-rocketed. I was a sales trainee with the unfortunate job of booking wholesale and retail orders week after week. Why unfortunate? Because we could not fulfil those orders! We didn’t have enough product, thanks to a production glitch, resulting from several factors including unanticipated demand and inadequate supplier management; yet the TV ads continued.
That was the most distressing summer of my life. Our wholesalers and retailers weren’t the only ones upset; my friends and family were upset too because they could not get the product. Meanwhile I continued using my supply of Oil of Olay, hoarded in the previous summer as a summer trainee at P&G.
The lesson?
If you want and indeed strive to create a demand, make sure you deliver. A consumer ‘primed’ to purchase a product is easy to lose, and difficult to regain.
But do these old-fashioned things still apply? Very much so.
Pat Phelan writes about how Bank of Ireland’s has failed to close the loop with their marketing partners O2 and CarphoneWarehouse. This has led to not just a lost customer for O2, but also a lost young savers account for Bank Of Ireland and lost commission for Carphone Warehouse. He describes them all as ‘muppets’, a description with which I find hard to disagree.
The lesson?
If you have a complicated product concept, make sure all the parties can deliver. A disappointed, irritated consumer is very difficult to woo back, especially in a competitive market where others are willing and eager to serve him.
Which brings me to Chris Brogan’s post, on promoting one’s book online. Chris writes about how Seth Godin just launched his new book ‘Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us’, using a whole slew of innovative marketing tricks. He gave free copies to some bloggers to give away; he made available a 0.99c audiobook on iTunes; and he built a social community, called Triiibes, ahead of the launch. Readers of his blog were invited to send him the electronic receipts of their advance orders and their snail-mail addresses. A certain number were then invited to register ahead of others on Triiibes. So far, so ideal.
The book was launched on October the 8th. As I write this post, on October the 20th, Amazon-UK tells me I won’t receive my ‘advance-ordered’ copy before November the 6th. I am not alone. Others who ordered with Amazon-UK are also waiting. So much for participating in the conversation about the book on Triiibes and for the advance-ordering hoopla.
Not just that – and I write this to complete the argument – our snail mail addresses were required as something special was to be sent to advance purchasers in October. May be, I am jumping the gun. May be, something will arrive in the next 10 days remaining in October. But when the book itself hasn’t arrived, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for anything else.
The lesson?
If your supplier screws up, it is unlikely you will benefit from the advance community building and promotion. A disappointed customer will not forget the experience.
Not very much unlike my first employer’s fiasco with the sunscreen, is this? Before ‘Tribes’, I had never bought any of Seth Godin’s books. The trend looks set to continue, unless a copy of Tribes somehow arrives, before I give up and cancel my pre-order.
It does not matter how many cycles of awareness-interest-desire-action you take your customer through or how many communities you create. The conversation just won’t start until the customer’s demand – whether of his own realisation of a ‘need’, or a latent need articulated through clever marketing – is fulfilled. Delivering the promises of marketing requires operational excellence. Whatever version of the Web we are at, and however creative our marketing, human expectations don’t change. They get more demanding, not less so.
In other words: it’s when you deliver the promised product/ service that counts.
What are your experiences of good service delivery and bad ones in the Web 2.0 world? Do use the comments link to share your stories.
Interesting reading:
Universal-McCann’s report ‘When did we start trusting strangers?‘