Today’s post comes from our Creative Director, Michelle Van Santen

At the beginning of the month JCPenney rolled out yet another revision to their logo in what seems to be a desperate attempt to stay relevant. This time they’ve dropped the “Penney” part of the name and proudly donned American flag colors. I’m not a big fan of this logo. It makes me think of an old Gap logo crammed into the corner of a red box, but I get that it’s supposed to reflect their new approach to the shopping experience called, “Fair and Square.”

But what exactly does “Fair and Square” mean?  Their website now features three types of pricing: “Everyday Prices,” “Month-long Values,” and “Best Prices.” As a consumer I started to scratch my head a bit, but I went ahead and clicked “learn more” to figure it out. “Everyday” pricing is just their normal prices, “Month-long Values” is specials for this month and “Best Prices” is the lowest prices on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month. Whaaaat?

I wanted to see what would happen if I tried buying something today, on the 4th Thursday of the month. It appears you can order an item any day of the week online, however you have to click on your size and color first to find out if they have any in stock. Now if gambling is your thing you might like this experience because it feels a bit like a roulette wheel. Instead of greying out unavailable options, I had to find out my selection was no longer in stock after going through the experience of selecting the size and color and then hitting “add to cart.” It was only after I’d invested some shopping time that I was notified whether I could actually make my desired purchase.

While I applaud JCPenney’s attempt to simplify things, I really wonder who they simplified it for: the consumer or JCP? I’m a busy working mom. When am I going to remember the 1st and 3rd Friday? I assure you, I am not going to mark this on my calendar. I simply don’t care that much. And frankly it doesn’t even seem to matter.

Whatever JCPenny was thinking in their efforts to revitalize their brand online, it has not been successful in execution. Fair and Square turns out to be Fussy and Frustrating.

I realized one gray morning that one of my car’s headlights had burned out. Being a guy, and a cheap guy at that, I assumed I could buy a bulb and simply replace the light myself. Of course, this was a mistaken assumption, given the frustrating complexity of today’s automobiles. I finally threw in the towel, treated my scraped knuckles, and drove to my local dealer. I didn’t have an appointment and was just hoping they’d notice my forlorn expression and mangled hand and take pity on me.

After I explained my situation to the service department rep, she checked her schedule and told me that they would replace the headlight, but also check all of the other lights and wash the car. Wash the car? I was pleasantly surprised. I’d come in without an appointment for a very small job and they were going to wash my car.

The goal of customer-centric practices is to develop meaningful relationships with your customers. One way to think about that is to ask, “How do I develop meaningful relationships with people in my life?” A small but significant part of building a good relationship is surprising someone in a positive way. Random acts of kindness. Flowers for no reason. Breakfast in bed. A car wash just because the customer’s car is filthy. While work done at a dealership can be expensive, my loyalty to this particular dealership was strengthened that day by a simple surprise, and I am now more apt to take my car there for service in the future.

First, do no harm. This well-known aphorism is fairly easy to understand as it applies to medicine: Don’t make the patient any worse off than he or she already is. But in marketing this is a little harder to explain. To say that, “communications programs should produce results at least as good as if nothing was done at all” is a start. But most marketers would want to go beyond this to say that for the dollars that I invest in my marketing efforts, I expect a positive return on that investment, because otherwise I would be better off doing nothing at all. Because ROI is the definitive measure of success in business and the Holy Grail of marketing, all of us had best make sure we can measure it accurately.

A recent study conducted by IBM reports that almost two thirds of CMOs think ROI will be the primary measure of their marketing effectiveness by 2015. But how do we measure this?  I’d add to that and say, “With a control group!” Every campaign or program should incorporate a control group into its design. The control group is a randomly selected measurable percentage of customers or prospects who met all of our selection criteria, but we did not market to them because we wanted to benchmark the rate of returns, in the form of purchase dollars, had we not done any communications to them at all. This allows us to determine the incremental revenue created by our communications and marketing efforts. Another way of saying this is we factor out sales and revenue that would have occurred anyway, enabling us to attribute the increase in sales to our marketing program. The colloquialism that is sometimes used here goes like this: “Even a blind squirrel will find a nut sometimes.” Translation: the number of nuts that a blind squirrel might find equals the number of sales that would have occurred without any marketing effort (i.e. sales that occurred in the control group). The control group is key here and we spend a great deal of effort convincing our clients to incorporate a control group into their programs.

If your organization has adopted a measurement philosophy, then you probably already design control groups into your campaigns or the campaigns you design for your clients. If you do not, then you will be faced with changing the culture of your organization toward one of analytics and measurement. Measuring your marketing programs is the only real way of knowing whether your efforts are improving ROI or harming it.

When a business is in sync with its customers, it can be a thing of beauty. An organization that is operating completely in line with the wants and needs of the people it is serving is almost certain to succeed.

When there’s disconnect between company and customer, however, the results can be ugly. The recent blow-up of SOPA/PIPA legislation serves as an example of the power wielded by the C2C (customer-to-customer) community. Congress proposed a bill that would have compromised the freedom and privacy of online users, stirring up a storm of criticism that included major websites being shut down in protest.

The bills were quickly withdrawn as Congress yielded to the power of the people. Had the representatives that initially sponsored and supported the bill held a better understanding of their constituents to begin with, they likely could have avoided a whole lot of negative attention.

Companies can take a lesson from the entire fiasco. Here are a few ways you can better understand customers and ensure that your business programs and initiatives will jive with them:

• Embrace your customers. Invest in your social capital by listening to your customers in order to understand their relationship with your business, their wants and needs.  Doing so helps create an open, trusting relationship with them.

• Weave insights into decisions. Give your customers a seat at the decision-making table through insights learned and acted upon.

• Get key influencer buy-in.  It’s great to use customer insight to guide business decisions, but don’t forget to collect feedback along the way.

The best strategy is one built around your most important asset. Involving the customer in your planning process will help you avoid heading in the wrong direction.

Once upon a time, embarrassing little slip-ups in customer service could be swept under the rug. If your brand was able to maintain a generally consumer-friendly reputation, you didn’t need to worry about isolated incidents doing much to damage that rep.

In a world where the internet and social media reign supreme, however, this is no longer the case. Particularly bad experiences will be shared with the world digitally, going viral and causing major headaches for your PR department.

For instance, one foolish employee types in a racial slur on a receipt for a pizza delivery.  A photo of the receipt gets posted to Twitter, retweeted by thousands of people, and turned into a national news story.

In another case, a single lazy deliveryman carelessly tosses a package filled with fragile cargo over a fence. The security camera recording is posted to YouTube and viewed by over 8 million people.

There are plenty of other notable examples, and if you’re one to peruse social media, you’ve undoubtedly encountered several.

The toughest thing about these incidents is that they’re extremely difficult to avoid, from a company standpoint. Papa John’s and FedEx both put considerable effort into fostering a customer-centric culture, and are generally successful in that regard, but it’s nearly impossible to protect against rogue employees who stray from that culture. One embarrassing incident such as the ones above can undo years of work toward building a desirable image.

The best answer? Make sure your hiring and training processes are top-notch, and that your customer-centric ideology is actively promoted, so that these kinds of situations can be avoided. When they do arise, have a strategy in place so that you’re ready to respond swiftly and firmly.

When I go shopping, I have some pretty strict rules that govern my choice of store, given the product selection I’m looking for.

For example, where do I go for groceries – Cub or Rainbow? The Cub store nearest me has easy access to parking, the aisles are wide and the checkout process is usually pretty fast and painless. My local Rainbow?  The parking lot is a nightmare, the aisles are crowded and illogical, and the checkout process takes forever. So, no brainer, I go to Cub.

I use the same rules to decide if I go to Office Max or Office Depot, Target or Walmart, and so forth.

However, when I run out for lunch, I repeatedly go to a local restaurant where it regularly takes a 10 minute cruise to find a parking spot, the lines are long and checkout can take anywhere from two minutes to 10 minutes. Why?

The answer is quality and service. The food is always good, the people behind the counter greet me cheerfully and remember my favorite meal choice and I always feel better after going there.

This store has managed to get me to break my own rules by providing benefits that outweigh the negatives when I’m making a choice.

I often imagine store management rubbing their hands together in joy when they see a packed parking lot, crowded aisles and long checkout lines.  I wonder if they also know what percentage of their customers is thinking, “I’ll never come here again!” and what percentage is thinking, “This is bad, but it’s worth it.”

If I were them, I’d make sure I did know, and I’d engage my entire staff in decreasing the first and increasing the second – convincing customers that the end result is worth a bit of pain.

Car dealerships and car salesmen get a bad rap for being crooked, uncaring and even slimy. However, this last spring my husband and I had a wonderful customer experience with the purchase of our 2011 Jeep Liberty.

We were previous Jeep owners and we were partial to purchasing another Jeep. However, with all of the changes in the SUV market and the cost of gasoline, we were hesitant. After spending weeks looking through advertisements and test-driving other vehicles, we headed to a Five Star Chrysler Jeep dealership near our home. A friendly salesman greeted us and as we discussed our concerns he answered our questions and recommended we start our decision process by test-driving a Jeep Patriot, which he told us to take for the day.

Upon returning the vehicle, we explained our aversions and he scheduled us to test-drive a Dodge Journey the following Saturday, again for the day. After returning the vehicle and reviewing the pros and cons, we went back the following week and took a day to test-drive the Jeep Liberty, which we ultimately decided to purchase.

The salesman made it a point to create an easy and stress-free customer experience. He was engaged with our concerns and worked with us to ensure we made the right decision rather than just selling a car. The real difference was test-driving a car for a day without a sales rep in the passenger seat. In my opinion, this tactic creates trust between the customer and the dealership.

Our exceptional experience didn’t end there. A few days later we received a call from the dealership asking for feedback on our sales rep, our purchasing experience, and what they could do to improve things in the future. That same week we received a hand-written note from the General Manager thanking us for our business. A few months later, we received a call from our salesman asking if we were still happy with our choice and reminding us that our first oil change was complimentary. Then last month, when my husband brought the Jeep in for service, the salesman greeted my husband in the customer lounge, asked if he needed a ride home rather than waiting, and offered to help my husband with his Christmas shopping – he had a brand new convertible in the show room that was just my color, and he was sure I’d love it. As expected, a few days afterwards, we received a friendly call from the dealership asking how our service was and if we had any concerns or suggestions.

This dealership obviously puts an enormous amount of emphasis on the customer experience and the customer relationship, even after the sale of the car. Because of this, we feel good about our purchase decision, as well as taking our vehicle there for service, and we have referred this dealership to others. I wish the retailer that sold us our big screen TV had the same customer experience and engagement policy!

Last week, the New York Times sent out an email to about 8.6 million people urging them to reconsider their decision to cancel home delivery and offering a discounted renewal rate.

The problem: most of these folks had never received home delivery from the Times, or hadn’t canceled. Confused, receivers of the email went about contacting the newspaper for an explanation. They received one – too hastily – as the company quickly tweeted the following: “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your New York Times subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”

Did the newspaper really expect readers to simply ignore the fact that their email addresses had apparently fallen into the hands of an outside party, which was now spamming them? In a consumer world where trust is essential, the Times seemed to have a real problem on their hands.

Later in the day, a correction was made, as the corporate communications department informed people that the email was, in fact, sent from the Times, and that a message intended for 300 people had accidentally been sent to their entire distribution list.

A regrettable mistake, to be sure, but far less alarming than the idea that their list had been hacked and their data compromised. Dispersing bad information for the sake of a quick response proved to be a very poor choice.

The entire snafu showed that even an organization as respected and sophisticated as the New York Times is not immune to massive missteps in public relations. When your customers’ trust is at stake, it’s incredibly important to get all the details right.

My wife and I have been looking for a new TV over the past few months and have spent considerable time researching online. After much scouring, we finally found the product we wanted on sale at a large electronics retailer. We were ready to buy.

Our first attempt to make the purchase was through the company’s website, where I learned that I could not order this particular product online. When I attempted to have it sent to the nearest store I was informed that it couldn’t be sent to any of the stores within the state of Minnesota.

This seemed odd since the website said the TV was available, and we really had our hearts set, so I called our local store to see if they might be able to acquire one so I could make the purchase in-store.

The associate there told me that their store had eight coming in on a shipment, but that it wasn’t clear whether any were available. Really? I’m sitting here, ready to spend, and your computer can’t even tell me whether the televisions you’re receiving are available to purchase?

Frustrated and nonplussed, I hung up and decided to try one more store. Here, I was connected to a much more accommodating associate who went to great lengths to try and track down the product I wanted, looking through their inventory and checking with several other stores.

Eventually it became apparent that I would not be able to purchase this item without driving out of state. The disappointing news was made easier to swallow by the helpfulness of this employee, and I ended up purchasing a different TV from the store.

Overall, it was an uneven experience, but fortunately ended well thanks to a positive final interaction. A less patient customer might have given up after the first try, however. This serves as a reminder that quality customer service should be uniformly applied across all operations, because a company’s promise of customer-centricity only works if embraced by every employee that interacts with the customer.

Here’s a reminder for all of us in the marketing mob. Every time I hear one of those insurance TV commercials touting that individuals can save $411 a year on average if they switch to brand X car insurance, I want to rip my hair out. Equally annoying are those ads that state that a person can save, on average, $795 a month if they switch to a “new and improved” drug prescription plan. Now maybe I am just a stats nerd, but for an individual to make a decision based solely on the average (in any scenario), seems absurd to me. Here’s why.

Let’s assume the insurance carrier in the TV ad provided us with the amounts of money people actually saved when they switched to their awesome car insurance (see table A). Notice that the average yearly savings for the nine individuals is $411. Great, let’s switch! Notice also that the standard deviation of the data (relax, standard deviation is an easy statistical concept) is $27.50. This amount gives an individual an idea of how spread-out the data is from the average. The larger the standard deviation the more widely the data varies. In scenario A, a standard deviation of $27.50 indicates that the yearly saving amounts for all nine participants were relatively close to the average of $411. Based on these figure (average and standard deviation), an individual is at least justified in looking into switching insurance carriers.

However, let’s assume the average yearly savings for the nine individuals looks a bit different (see table B). Notice that the average savings is still $411, but the standard deviation has increased drastically from scenario A –$27.50 to $539.05. This indicates that in scenario B the saving amounts are varying much more substantially from the average. An individual may still save $411, but their chances are lower than in the first scenario. An average yearly savings of $120 seems more probable in the second scenario, based on the figures provided and assuming a non-biased sample.

It’s a good practice for marketers to remember that average values tell an individual only half the story. Some companies (not just insurance) are betting that customers will change/switch/buy based on only this statistic. Using these tactics, the company might make a sale, but will it build customer loyalty once the person finds out how little they’ve saved?

Knowing how dispersed the data is (aka standard deviation) tells the other half of the story. Together, averages and corresponding standard deviations will help marketers make more accurate and credible claims.