ResearchTalk

We’re just back from the excellent two-day European Customer Experience Event where folks from Zappos and Harley-Davidson talked about how they build their ‘wow’ experience.

It’s our first time there and, to be honest, not the usual beat for us. But it should be – both for us and the insight community in general. Researchers who do anything related to loyalty or customer service should be attending this type of event because they get to meet the folks who actually put their work into practice – customer experience and service heads from major organisations, public and private.

We’ll blog more with some things that caught our eye. But first, in what’s becoming a tradition, here’s a wrap-up chat with three fellow delegates in which we talk highlights, learnings, customer experience in the public sector, digital natives vs. immigrants, behavioural economics, engendering loyalty by charging people (!), transparency and authenticity, convergence, and improvements for next year. Enjoy!

STARRING:

• Brian Koma, VP Research, Vovici
• Sharon Bayliss, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham
• Toni Blumeris, MD, Harding & Yorke (S. Africa)

European Customer Experience World event

A lot of folks are drinking the Zappos kool-aid these days. And it’s easy to see why. Because every now and then you come across a company that’s so contrarian in its thinking and execution that it leaves most observers bewildered. Before it was Google with quirky initiatives such as 20% time, something we now know powers its innovation funnel.

Online retailer Zappos is the latest purveyor of contrarian thinking, all in the pursuit of its happiness business model. For example, staff can spend six minutes or six hours on the phone with a single customer – there’s never any pressure to hit productivity quotas. New staff are paid to leave to gauge their commitment. And customers can return shoes up to a year after purchase, postage free, for a full refund. The list goes on.

The result? Booming sales – a couple years ago they broke the $1bn mark. And they were recently acquired by Amazon for – insert Dr. Evil voice – one billion dollars!

Harley-Davidson needs no introduction. It’s an iconic brand that, unlike Zappos, has been around for decades. And for many of us it conjures up distinct emotions such as freedom even if we’ve never experienced their products.

So, why are we telling you all this? Because you’ll learn more about how these companies are building strong cultures which drive profitability in the short podcast below (15 mins). It’s a discussion with the COO of Zappos and a senior marketer from Harley-Davidson, both of whom will be speaking at the upcoming European Customer Experience World event in May – check out the website for tickets and details.

Kindly hosted by Dean van Leeuwen, TomorrowToday’s intellectual adventurer and scholar of the new world of work. He focuses on customer loyalty and talent engagement.

In the chat we learn about…

• The genesis of Zappos quirkiness
• How Harley-Davidson is managing to stay relevant today
• Whether the ‘humanizing the organisation’ movement has staying power
• Examples of initiatives to build a sustainable culture of positive experiences/behavioural economics
• The evidence that these deliver topline and bottom-line results

STARRING:

• Alfred Lin, COO, Zappos
• Markus Kramer, director of marketing operations, Harley-Davidson
• HOST – Dean van Leeuwen, intellectual adventurer, TomorrowToday

Music by Amber Ojeda.

Faris Yakob, EVP and chief technology strategist at ad. agency McCann Erickson, takes us through his six rules of social media engagement which he believes brands should follow to offer something more meaningful and powerful to people.

Filmed at the BrainJuicer/HSBC London Summerfest in June 2009 (disclosure: we produced the vid).

More videos from this event here.

Mark Earls, author of Herd, talks about why copying is the important new paradigm for encouraging behavioural change.

Filmed at the BrainJuicer/HSBC London Summerfest in June 2009 (disclosure: we produced the vid).

More videos from this event here

There’s quite a bit involved in designing and running good research communities, so we decided to create this podcast where we speak with a couple of folks who have been actively developing communities for a number of years.

First up there’s Tom Ewing, yes theTom Ewing who created quite a stir at this year’s Research ‘08 conference. Back in 2000, Tom created the ILX (I love music) message board as a personal endeavour and it grew viraly. At the time of recording Tom was in a marketing role at Research International. But soon after, parent Kantar had the sense to make him a social media adviser.

Next there’s Matt Rhodes of FreshNetworks, the online community-building part of the award-winning FreshMinds. Matt’s an active blogger and recently revealed that FreshNetworks had won a £5m ($7.5m) interest-free loan as part of an entrepreneur competition – quite a nice prize in the (economic) circumstances.

Hoping, as always, you find this useful.

 STARRING 

• Matt Rhodes, Head of Client Services, FreshNetworks
• Tom Ewing, Social Media expert, Kantar Operations

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Building on their open and friendly approach, smoothie brand Innocent has just published its first annual report. It’s not a legal or regulatory requirement, it’s done purely to engage more with its passionate users and other interested folks.

It’s a fun and informative read. Plus it balances a discussion of their successes in 2007 by giving equal prominence to, well, ‘things they learned from’ (including being called out by BBC’s Watchdog for their exploding packaging, and that polarising deal with McDonald’s).

It’s embedded below but if you want to read it and don’t have bionic eyes then you can download your very own copy here.

Coinciding with its publication, Innocent also ran the first AGM…

‘…a day when we open the doors of Fruit Towers, ask our drinkers to come and hear what we’ve been up to and let them tell us face to face what we could be doing better.”

Here’s one of the videos from the event – we can’t imagine too many AGMs being this much fun

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

We’ve had great success working with conference organisers like ESOMAR and IIR to evangelise flagship events, success being measured by the resultant buzz/ word-of-mouth and download stats.

But wouldn’t it be cool if someone actually decided to go to a conference as a result of listening to one of the podcasts? Well, the kind Ruth McNeil, who handles marketing for the BIG Conference who we recently collaborated with, came back with just that message.

Ruth says:

…One person said that the podcasts had influenced their decision to attend (a first timer who came to the whole conference). I am pleased that so many had listened to the [pre-]conference [podcasts]!

Fantastic news.

Podcasting works because people are drawn to interesting conversations. Not conversations they feel they must listen to. Conversations that they want to listen to. That’s what makes it a perfect medium for sponsors of all kinds who want to get their compelling message across to movers and shakers.

Get in touch in case you fancy a chat (contact details as always in left sidebar).

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Series:Events Series:ESOMAR Series:EMRE Series:BIG Series:Wildfire

Reuben Steiger, founder and CEO of virtual world agency/consultancy Millions of Us, and former evangelist for Linden Lab, creators of virtual world Second Life, chats with Jess Greenwood of Contagious magazine about…

• The genesis of Reuben’s interest in Second Life
• Coping with the Second Life Liberation Army
• The virtual worlds landscape and the likely impact of Sony’s new virtual world ‘Home’
• Are virtual worlds a reaction to an alienation in real life?

7mins | Recorded @ Wildfire ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

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Jeff Kaplan and David Shackley, both from AOL’s central marketing team, chat about…

• The online-only Mark Burnett-produced show Gold Rush
• Consumer-generated content
• Performance of AOL properties
• Evolution of video search service Truveo

6mins | Recorded @ Wildfire ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

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Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO Denuo and Chief Innovation Officer, Publicis, chats about…

• The business importance of authenticity
• Why PR agency Edelman’s reputation suffered in the Wal Mart undisclosed blogger fiasco
• Three big media trends he’s seeing including the shift to on-demand, the participatory culture, and the shift from segmentation to reaggregation
• Why he’s ’short’ on Google’s ability to monetize YouTube and ‘long’ on Yahoo’s future

8mins | Recorded @ Wildfire ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

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