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Zavee Teamwork

by Ron on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Yesterday most of the Zavee team attended the Get Motivated seminar at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, FL. The all-day event included talks by Rudy Giuliani, Robert Schuller, Zig Ziglar and Colin Powell, among others.

Gen. Colin Powell

Gen. Colin Powell (via Charles Haynes)

Several of the speakers, including General Powell, shared their insights into leadership. General Powell said that he had brought the same style of leadership to teams of every size, whether 40 people or 3 million. The hallmarks of leadership that he described – recognizing and rewarding performance; making sure the team has the resources they need; and requiring accountability – certainly apply to teams of any size. But not all teams are the same, and different situations sometimes call for different leadership styles.

Our team at Zavee is a case in point. As a startup, in a rapidly evolving space, Zavee is not following a well-established path to growth. On the contrary, we are to a large extent inventing our path as we go along. Zavee is a business built on great ideas as well as great execution, and we don’t think anyone at Zavee has a monopoly on great ideas. We think it is vital to listen to every member of the Zavee team, and to consider their perspectives seriously before committing to any course of action. This means that our leadership style is unusually collegial, rather than top-down, and requires an environment of mutual trust and respect.

Of course, once a decision is made we expect everyone to do their best to implement it, even if they had proposed a different course of action. One of the many rewards of working at Zavee is seeing our colleagues overcome their disparate viewpoints and work together as a team to build our business. Whatever their point of view on any given issue, everyone at Zavee is totally committed to our mission of supporting local shoppers, merchants and causes.

One of our business goals at Zavee is scale: dramatically increasing revenues without proportionately increasing costs. One of our strategies is to avoid a conventional, hierarchical management structure. Although unavoidable in some organizations, we believe that this kind of structure tends to hamper creativity and impair innovation. However big Zavee gets – and we hope it gets really, really big – we will strive to maintain a small, close-knit senior management team like we have today.

As a small business that isn’t planning to stay small, we have given a lot of thought to our management and organizational structure. Have you done the same with your business?

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Social Giving Meets Social Shopping

by Ron on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

We have written about social shopping, which is the heart of the Zavee platform, but are you familiar with “social giving”? Social giving is Social Media used for philanthropic or other non-profit purposes. Social giving wasn’t widely discussed even a year ago, but two events – the disputed elections in Iran and the earthquake in Haiti – gave rise to a tremendous amount of Social Media activity, which in turn got people thinking about the role of Social Media in the non-profit sector.

According author Geoff Livingston, who follows social giving closely, social giving can be a source of both new donations and newly engaged donors and activists. Social giving also can engage consumers in corporate philanthropy campaigns.

  • In the wake of the elections individual Iranians used Social Media to get news out of the country after the government had restricted conventional media access.
  • A post on Philanthropy Potluck discussed campaigns the author called “social giving contests”, in which consumers determine how companies distribute funds as charitable contributions. The post cites campaigns by Target and Tom’s of Maine, in which the public got to “vote” for potential recipients of donations.
  • Immediately after the quake in Haiti, the American Red Cross and other organizations launched texting campaigns that raised over $30 million from individuals who sent a text message that automatically added a donation to their wireless bill. More than $20 million was raised by the American Red Cross alone, a sum unlikely to be raised as quickly, if at all, by conventional solicitation methods. The Red Cross using the same text2give program to raise funds for victims of the earthquake in Chile.

Zavee’s social giving feature combines several social giving concepts. Like the social giving contests, Zavee shoppers control the distribution of the 20% of our fees that we have committed to donate to civic and charitable causes that have joined Zavee. The mechanism for directing Zavee contributions is called Care Shares(tm). In addition to their cash back rewards, Zavee shoppers earn points called Care Shares based on the amount of each purchase from a Zavee merchant. Zavee shoppers periodically select which causes will receive their Care Shares. Zavee contributes cash to those causes based on the Care Shares allocated to each cause, which means that shoppers who purchase more control a larger slice of the contribution pie. (Yet another reason for shoppers to purchase from Zavee merchants.)

Santas Race for Charity

Santas Race for Charity (via Lincolnian)

Shoppers make their own decisions about how to allocate their Care Shares, but the networking features of Zavee encourage shoppers to discuss the various causes in our program. We take networking a step further by putting the causes themselves in the network. That means that they can engage directly with shoppers to provide information, answer questions, announce events and otherwise enrich shoppers’ understanding of the value they provide to the community. The benefit to causes of communicating effectively is clear: greater awareness and understanding by shoppers can lead to greater allocations of Care Shares, which means greater contributions by Zavee. Causes also can encourage their own members to join Zavee, who presumably will be inclined to allocate their Care Shares to the cause to which they belong.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Causes may not be as far up the curve as companies (to say nothing of individuals) when it comes to Social Media, but events like the Iran elections and the Haiti quake response demonstrate the potential impact Social Media can have for non-profits.
  • The non-profit sector is likely to develop uses for Social Media that are both creative and effective. Businesses should be watching.
  • Programs like Zavee, which combine the consumer-business integration of the social giving contest with the active participation of the causes themselves on the network, will be one way to for causes to gain a great deal of value from Social Media.

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Zavee’s First Featured Merchants

by Ron on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

It doesn’t seem very long ago that Zavee existed solely in our developer’s test environment. But we have been up and running for a while now, working out the inevitable kinks and fixing the kinds of “what were we thinking?” mistakes that customers can spot in a heartbeat.

One of the things that is working well is our merchant search capability. Every Zavee user – merchant, shopper and cause – is precisely geo-located, so Zavee can center a search on a specific shopper and display the merchants within a true radius. This capability lets us do a lot of interesting things. One thing we can do is promote merchants to shoppers based on distance.

Our new “Featured Merchants” capability, which we are introducing this week, highlights specific merchants for a week at a time. However, to keep relevance and interest high, shoppers will see only those Featured Merchants within the radius they specify. In other words, shoppers in Fort Lauderdale will see a different list of Featured Merchants than shoppers in West Palm Beach.

This week’s crop of Featured Merchants provides a wonderful cross-section of the forward-thinking merchants who have joined Zavee:

Minuteman Press in Boca Raton is a full color commercial printing house that can produce a wide variety of printed materials, from brochures and catalogs to corporate letterhead and business cards to signs and banners. Minuteman is one of the few South Florida printers with the expertise to operate the world-renowned Heidelberg line of full-color presses.

Custom Vision Care in West Boca specializes in the most advanced techniques and technologies create a customized visual rehabilitation program for every patient. Above and beyond conventional lenses and treatments, Dr. Marotte and his staff maximize patients’ visual efficiency, visual comfort and safety. Visit Dr. Marrotte for a personal eye exam and visual needs consultation.

Ultra Cleaners Pointe at Wellington Green is the west county location of one of South Florida’s premier dry cleaners. Ultra Cleaners is continually improving its processes, investing in new state-of-the art equipment, and constantly recruiting skilled employees. Not near Wellington? Search on Zavee to locate Ultra’s other convenient locations.

Jimmy’s Bistro is one of the best-kept secrets in Delray’s exciting restaurant scene – but it won’t be a secret for long. The owner, Jimmy, has a resume that would be the envy of any chef in Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Jimmy worked in New York for 10 years at world-class restaurants such as Aureole and Le Chantilly. He also is one of the few American chefs in South Florida who worked for a year and a half at some of leading restaurants in Paris, including famed brasserie Zephyr and trendy bistro La Robe et le Palais.

Coral Springs Flowers & Events has supplied flowers and floral arrangements for some of the area’s most elegant events. With an outstanding reputation for the freshest products and the most creative concepts, Corals Springs Flowers & Events should be at the top of the list for everyone who is looking for a high-end floral solution.

Coral Springs-based David Seidner, P.T., D.C. says, “You’re in pain, I can help.” As the only dual-licensed doctor in all of South Florida with professional medical expertise as both a Physical Therapist as well as Chiropractic physician he can assure you that you will receive extraordinary treatment and care supported by the most advanced equipment and technology.

Located in North Lauderdale, A.S.E. Car Care Specialists is a complete auto repair facility. A.S.E. technicians can handle not just the usual tire repairs and oil changes but are fully qualified to perform complete engine rebuilding and electrical rewiring and repair. Wonder where the “A.S.E.” name comes from? Every one of their mechanics is certified by the prestigious National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence.

From fires to floods, ServiceMaster Clean by Robinson is Broward County’s disaster recovery specialist. Based in Fort Lauderdale but willing to travel anywhere, ServiceMaster Clean operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to insure timely disaster restoration response to restore your home or get your business back in business!

Watch for more new features and capabilities coming soon!

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I’ve Been Annualized!

by Ron on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Last Spring I attended a Loyalty Marketing Conference at which the head of Best Buy’s Reward Zone program described how her company planned to handle a problem that seems to affect many large loyalty programs: inactive members. She explained that while the company was not about to throw inactive Reward Zone members out of the program, they would eventually forfeit their points if they failed to meet an activity threshold. I didn’t meet the threshold, and I just lost my points.

Best Buy Logo

Best Buy

Why did Best Buy take this step? Is it something all loyalty programs ought to consider? And what does it mean for Zavee? At first glance it might appear that companies can safely ignore inactive members. They don’t do anything to tarnish the brand; many do make purchases, at least occasionally; and they don’t require much care and feeding.

In fact, all three of these assumptions are wrong. And companies that segment out inactive members from their loyalty programs are doing the right thing – provided they handle it the right way.

Although inactive members of a loyalty program may not be actively harming the brand, they are not evangelizing for it either. They may be willing and able to recount positive experiences and describe brand attributes, but they are hardly the brand ambassadors that the merchant thought it was getting in exchange for points or other loyalty currency.

This leads to the next assumption: that inactive loyalty program members remain valuable because they may not be completely dormant as customers. Here the risk isn’t that inactive members won’t shop, it’s that they will only buy on sale. Shopping only during promotions may be the behavior of a rational consumer, but not of a loyal one. Program members who shop only when the company has already reduced its margin arguably are the last customers who should be earning loyalty rewards. This is something merchants should bear in mind quite apart from the loyalty context: Customers who are purely (or predominantly) price-driven are a business’ least profitable customers because they return the lowest margin with their purchases. The return on investment of marketing to such customers is therefore lower than for other customers. Adding loyalty exposure only adds to that cost.

Finally, maintaining an inactive program member incurs hard costs. Programs that use physical cards have to print, issue and occasionally replace them. In the aggregate, data processing and storage needs are higher than if the program were limited to active members. Reducing the size of the program by setting inactive members to the side may reduce these costs.

How should a company handle the pruning of inactive members? Best Buy’s approach seems pretty good.

  • First, the company communicated its intentions clearly and repeatedly by email – not that I paid a lot of attention.
  • Second, Best Buy didn’t pretend to create an aspirational environment in which I could keep my points if only I shopped just a little more. I was so far from the activity cutoff (which was clearly disclosed in the email) that it would have taken the purchase of a high-end home theater for me even to get close.
  • Third, the company increased its engagement with members who met the activity threshold by issuing reward certificates.
  • Finally, they didn’t drop me from the program altogether. This was something the Best Buy exec emphasized at the conference. Taking away unused loyalty points from an inactive member sends the message that loyalty is a two-way street. But dropping a customer from the program sends the message that the customer should shop elsewhere. That isn’t a message any retailer wants to send. Instead, I was “annualized” – my point balance will be reviewed annually and I can keep my points if I shop enough.

Some of these principles apply to Zavee more than others. As a registered card program we don’t have the hard costs associated with loyalty cards, and unlike single-merchant programs we hope that shoppers can always find merchants they want to do business with. Instead of an annual cutoff based on activity we will forfeit a shopper’s unpaid reward balances only after 24 consecutive months of no activity.

However, the main difference between Zavee and a typical loyalty program is that Zavee is also a social shopping platform. Because active users of the program receive more and better information from fellow shoppers we believe that activity will largely be self-reinforcing. Shoppers who frequently write reviews and communicate with other shoppers will gain influence in the Zavee community as well as the opportunity to earn rewards and direct charitable contributions.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Dormant loyalty program members are bad for the brand. So are dormant customers. Increase your engagement or reduce your exposure, but don’t ignore them.
  • Calibrate offers to avoid providing price incentives to customers who are already driven predominantly by price. Those are your most expensive customers and least profitable sales.
  • Find ways to earn and reward customer loyalty that aren’t limited to price.

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Customer Service – For the Recession and Beyond

by Ron on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Here at Zavee we spend a lot of time thinking about what smaller businesses can learn from larger ones. We also think a lot about customer service. The current recession seems to us an excellent time for businesses to focus on customer service. Commentators seem to agree. Their reasons may be obvious, but they make sense nevertheless:

  • Retaining existing customers costs far less than acquiring new ones
  • When competing for customers, businesses often have to choose between offering more value (e.g., by improving service) or cutting prices
  • A good customer experience makes future purchases more likely, while a bad experience does the opposite

These posts focused mainly on larger companies, many of which have downsized their customer service staffs. There are anecdotal indications, if nothing else, that customer service has suffered as a result.

City Light customer account operators, 1945

City Light customer account operators, 1945

On the other hand, some larger companies are maintaining or even improving customer service. We think that these companies will be well positioned after the economy recovers because they will have generated loyalty and improved the value of their brand at a time when some of their competitors were cutting service or hiding from customers. Some are using technology: Comcast and Best Buy are by now well known as pioneers in the use of Twitter to learn about and respond to customer care issues. Other companies, such as Southwest Airlines, maintain high levels of customer satisfaction by making service part of the organization’s DNA (although no one is perfect). And I have had at least one potentially negative experience with a rental car company turn positive simply because a well-trained senior manager was on the scene and jumped in with the right approach and a fair solution.

Smaller companies have both a harder and an easier time maintaining customer service in a recession. Harder, because increasing expenses during a time of weak revenues may be difficult to swallow. Easier, because the cost-benefit analysis is much clearer. Some large companies may believe they can afford to exchange so much in sales for so much in customer service expense, but most small companies don’t think that way. Although there certainly are exceptions, most small companies realize that they can’t afford to give up sales to save money. They also realize that good service builds repeat business and long-term loyalty. Finally, they should also realize that customers talk – which means that good customer service can generate referrals: the least expensive but most reliable way to acquire new customers. The good news for small companies is that maintaining and improving customer service doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are some low-cost approaches to customer service that businesses can start now and keep in place even after the economy improves:

  • Listen to your customers. There are many ways to listen: you can use applications like Facebook and Twitter; you can send surveys to customers by email; you can call them on the phone; and you can chat with them at the point of sale. As long as you are sincere and open you will learn a lot about what you are doing right and how you might improve.
  • Empower your associates. Your customer-facing employees should be encouraged to engage with customers at every point of contact and empowered to offer solutions to at least some concerns or complaints. Anything that can’t be handled at their level should be referred to the appropriate person and dealt with promptly.
  • Use technology wisely. At Zavee, we use a third-party application called Zendesk to help us manage customer service. Clicking on a “Help” link from anywhere on the Zavee site opens our Member Services page, from which anyone (even non-members) can read our content, engage with others in a forum or contact us with a question, comment or complaint. This system creates a numbered “ticket” for every interaction, which is automatically flagged for followup by Zavee but also gives the user a way to follow up with us. It turns everyone in our organization into a customer service agent, because we never know in advance who will be the best person to handle the next ticket that comes in.
  • Don’t go it alone. In addition to blogs and other online resources, local chambers of commerce are a great source of information from businesses like yours in your own market. If you are located in South Florida, we invite you to join Zavee. Our marketing tools help merchants understand their customers better and our networking tools improve their ability to communicate with and learn from customers.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • If you think the recession is time to double down on customer service, you’re right. If you think it’s time to cut back, think again.
  • It may be easier for you to provide excellent service than a larger competitor, because you are closer to the customer. That’s a key point of differentiation – make the most of it.
  • Customers talk. Make sure they have only good things to say about you.
  • Don’t stop once the economy improves.

Update (2/18/10): “Poor Customer Service Costs Companies $83 Billion Annually” provides a useful summary of an impressive global research report (pdf) on the high cost of poor customer service.

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The Other Super Bowl

by Ron on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

How did you like the big game? No, not the one with the Saints and Colts – the one with the Snickers and Doritos. The phenomenon probably began during the first dot com boom of the late 90s, but in recent years the commercials that air during the Super Bowl have attracted almost as much attention as the game itself.

Drew Brees, Jan 7, 2010

It’s fun for those of us whose marketing budgets don’t include the $2-3 million it takes to buy a spot or even the mid-six figures it costs for production.  It’s like going to the marina to gawk at the hundred foot yachts.  Still, there are some things small business people can learn from the big game.

One thing is the value of leverage, getting extra value out of your marketing dollars.  Long before the game is played and the commercials run, there are stories in the media about different marketers’ strategies and even teaser clips of upcoming spots. Using public relations to generate interest ahead of the air date makes sense because it’s a low-cost, effective strategy for increasing awareness and impact.  This year the story lines included Pepsi’s decision not to advertise on the Super Bowl, Budweiser’s decision not to feature its iconic Clydesdale horses (a decision that was ultimately reversed) and CBS’s decision to air a “pro-family” spot featuring Florida QB Tim Tebow.

According to most commentators, this wasn’t a vintage year for Super Bowl ads. “There were no standouts,” according this post on AdRants that summarized industry and consumer reactions to the ads. Seth Stephenson of Slate agreed. Bob Garfield of Advertising Age liked Audi’s “Green Police” ad, the “men’s liberation” themed spots from Dodge and FloTV, and not much else. Barbara Lippert of AdWeek and Slate’s Stephenson liked Google’s simple, effective execution that combined narrative with product demonstration – and cost next to nothing to produce. But just about everyone seemed to like the Snickers spot in which young athletes played like Betty White and Abe Vigoda until they ate a Snickers bar.

As always, advertising insiders took their shots at USA Today’s Ad Meter, which records the real time reactions of a panel of consumers to each of the spots as they run during the game. The Ad Meter can drive professionals nuts – especially since 2007, when CareerBuilder fired its agency after a poor Ad Meter showing. The Ad Meter doesn’t measure strategic insight or clarity of message – it’s the People’s Choice Awards of advertising, and it was won this year by the Snickers ad.  Lippert observed that “[t]he spots that do well on the Ad Meter are the ones that feature the kind of tricks viewers have been trained to expect, like man-on-man violence and/or cute animals. It’s like teaching to the test.”  Garfield called the consumers on the panel “AdMeter-ocrities.”

Another takeaway of interest to small business is the increasing impact of Social Media on conventional media.  While insiders might not like it, Social Media makes consumer reaction to advertising easier to track, and agencies are starting to see the value in doing so. In addition to the Ad Meter and Ad Bowl (another panel-based ranking), Social Media provided a way to gain insight into consumer reactions to the ads. Ad agency Mullen and Social Media monitoring firm Radian6 tracked Twitter feeds to determine the top brands coming out of the Super Bowl (Doritos, Google and Focus on the Family took the top three spots). Several other firms had similar strategies.

As for me, my Super Bowl Sunday was made by Google, Snickers and E-Trade (I know, but imagine another category that has room for both trash-talking babies and Sam Waterston).  And the Saints. Definitely the Saints.

The Zavee takeaway:

  • Make your marketing part of your company’s story – it will make your marketing budget do more and go farther.
  • You can do it inexpensively – conventional PR is one way, Social Media is another.
  • The most distinctive and creative way to tell your story doesn’t have to be the most expensive.

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Can Social Media Help Toyota Repair Its Reputation?

by Ron on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

As most of the world now knows, Toyota’s US unit has announced the recall of approximately 2.3 million vehicles to repair a condition that has resulted in gas pedals sticking while the car is being driven. Safety issues are perhaps an automaker’s greatest threat, and Toyota clearly is taking the situation seriously. The company has even halted production of the affected vehicles until the problem can be solved. Nevertheless, according to auto blog The Truth About Cars, the Japanese business publication Nikkei (think Wall Street Journal) claims that the crisis “is seen as a major dent in the side of the leading Japanese automaker’s reputation as a builder of reliable automobiles.”

The Toyota issue is the largest product recall since the rise of Social Media, but it is not the first. In November, 2009, UK stroller manufacturer Maclaren recalled approximately one million strollers after reports that children were getting their fingers caught in the folding mechanism. The company put recall information on its web site, which, according to the New York Times, promptly crashed. Like Toyota, Maclaren’s stellar reputation resulted in a case of “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Time reported that parent blogs were merciless toward the company. Maclaren posted a video PSA to YouTube announcing the recall and the availability of a repair kit, but apparently did not take advantage of either Facebook or Twitter to communicate with parents.

Moving Forward?

Moving Forward?

Toyota is already receiving some criticism for being insufficiently engaged with its customers. The company has a page on its site dedicated to the recall, with links to FAQs and a video news release consisting of talking head sound bites from COO Jim Lentz along with ad-quality footage of the cars and the factory. The video is disappointing: Lentz’s comments sound blandly reassuring but never manage to engage. Today’s Ad Age reports that Toyota’s video is now on the company’s Facebook page, where it is said to have been well received. If the video is posted on the Toyota page, however, the company has not made it easy to find. Most of the wall postings appear to be from car owners and most are in the “I love my Toyota!” genre (it’s not called a fan page for nothing). There appears to be no company-supplied content relating to the recall (unless that video is there somewhere) and certainly no conspicuous attempt to leverage Toyota’s 70,000+ Facebook fans.

Toyota does have a presence on Twitter, but until yesterday the company was using the feed to point to information on the company’s web site. On Monday afternoon Lentz spent 20 minutes fielding questions on Twitter. The Q&A was announced only shortly before it began, and greater lead time might have yielded more participants. However, car bloggers such as @jalopnik and its editor @raywert were on the feed as well as several Toyota dealers. Although this was not the smoothest exercise, it strikes us as a good first step toward engaging with customers, not just making announcements to them.

Toyota is using a wide range of media to announce that it knows how to repair the faulty parts. Now let’s see how Toyota uses Social Media as it tries to repair its reputation.

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The Facebook Privacy Debate, Zavee and You

by Ron on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

There is a fascinating debate underway over recent changes to how Facebook handles user information. This highly informative post on ReadWriteWeb summarizes the changes, which make many types of user content more publicly accessible, including to search engines, than before. Some of these changes can be reversed by the user, but others are permanent.

Apart from the practical consequences for some Facebook users, who never thought their content would be visible to their neighbors, employers, children, etc., the changes raise profound philosophical issues about the nature of privacy in today’s society. Every application that touches the social web confronts these issues. Zavee is no exception. As we developed our application we constantly asked ourselves whether we had struck the right balance between public and private. We are comfortable with the decisions we made, but it is always advisable to pay attention to a market leader like Facebook.

Facebook’s argument, as articulated by its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in this interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, is that social norms are changing and Facebook’s changes are merely reflecting those norms, not driving them. He and other Facebook executives point to phenomena from blogging to reality TV to support the proposition that we as a society have chosen to live our lives more publicly. It isn’t that privacy is, in Arrington’s words, “really, really, dead” as much as it has been redefined.

via facebook.com

via facebook.com

Dissenters raise several objections to Facebook’s actions. Marshall Kirkpatrick is among those who claim that these changes are contrary to Facebook’s previous statements about user privacy and conveniently align with enhanced revenue opportunities. Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook and others argue that Facebook is actually imposing its view of privacy on its users by making it impossible for users to keep certain content out of public view. As O’Neill writes, “User privacy settings should theoretically reflect the ongoing societal shift without Facebook making any changes whatsoever. If users truly want to share more information with the world, they will.” Kirkpatrick also points to this paper (pdf) suggesting that the issue is not all or nothing: privacy is violated when content is published outside of its intended context, such as friends or family. However, the most profound argument from a philosophical standpoint is that privacy, in the conventional sense of being able to “define the boundary between our public self and our private self,” is a right that is an essential component of our conception of personal liberty. As Bruce Schneier put it:

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect. . . .

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause.

Zavee’s business model is premised on what Howard Lindzon calls “User Controlled Privacy.” Zavee’s value as a social shopping platform derives from shoppers who voluntarily exchange information with other shoppers so that all shoppers benefit from the community’s collective information, insight and experience. However, Zavee shoppers have a great deal of flexibility and control over the personal information that appears on the Zavee network, and Zavee never discloses the details of any purchase to any other shopper. Shoppers are free to include as much or as little information as they wish in their reviews, but otherwise their purchases and rewards are completely private.

We think this is an appropriate place to draw the line between public and private. For a different perspective, check out Blippy, a platform on which every purchase with a registered card is published to the entire network. Blippy appears to have met with some success, but it is not a path Zavee intends to follow.

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NBC, NYT and Loyalty

by Ron on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

In the course of an entertaining post about NBC’s current “two hosts, one spot” late-night nightmare, Dean Bairaktaris asks, “Where is everyone’s Brand Loyalty? Is it with NBC, Leno or Conan?” This is an insightful question, because the expensive and embarrassing contretemps has been presented largely as Jay vs. Conan, Old Guard vs. Young Turk, homespun vs. hip.

via mashable.com

via mashable.com

The potential impact on NBC as a major media channel has largely been ignored, except in posts like Dean’s, as Conan is widely presumed to be able to shift his audience, more or less intact, to Fox or another media outlet. But it’s fair to ask whether the broadcast networks actually have brand equity apart from the shows they carry. Is there an “NBC-ness” to the Tonight Show (or any other NBC program) that would not carry over to another network? That arbiter of absurdity, The Onion, would certainly say no.

The soon-to-be-announced decision by The New York Times to put some or all of its content behind a pay wall also involved a debate over the brand equity of the Times versus that of its content (in this case, the paper’s prominent columnists). An outstanding article in New York Magazine details some columnists’ concerns that in its pursuit of subscription revenue the Times would be sacrificing its position as a leading online news brand, giving up both traffic and influence (as well as premium advertising rates, apparently).

I think the two situations have a lot in common. In both cases, the underlying question was whether the locus of customer loyalty is the channel (NBC and NYT) or its content (shows and columnists). I’m not sure the answer is the same in every case. I don’t think broadcast TV networks are differentiated enough to generate brand loyalty, but I’m not sure that’s equally true of newspapers (I grew up reading the New York Times so I might be biased – or just conditioned).

For small businesses, the lesson is to think about what aspect of your brand your customers are loyal to, and not to assume that all customers are loyal to the same thing or for the same reason. You want the locus of loyalty to be your overall brand so that customers will stay with you as your business changes, whether those changes involve staffing, product assortment, location or even store closings. However, until you have the conversation with your customers, you can’t be sure that they are loyal to your brand or to your personable store manager, convenient location or frequent sales.

As a smaller business, you have the ability to engage with customers directly and provide an overall customer experience that embodies your brand’s unique promises and values. Larger brands often (but not always) provide a product experience that is not as closely connected to the brand. This is an advantage for smaller businesses which, unlike large brands, should never need to market brands and products separately. To leverage the direct connection with customers, treat loyalty as a two-way street. There are many ways to demonstrate your loyalty to customers, but the easiest is to listen to what they have to say.

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The Count of Social Media

by Ron on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Imagine having that on your business card! In a world of Brogans, Vaynerchuks and Mashables there is no shortage of candidates worthy of the title, but this post isn’t about any of them.

Anyone who has kids, or who was one fairly recently, will remember Sesame Street’s Lugosi-eque math whiz, Count von Count. The Count would count anything, anytime, anywhere. And he was much better at it than, say, The Spanish Inquisition:

Imagine, then, what the Count – let alone the Inquisition – would have to say about this: a Flash-based application that provides a real-time count of Social Media activity. Courtesy of Gary Hayes’ Personalize Media blog, here is Gary’s Social Media counter:

Visit Gary’s blog if you want to know about his sources, but the details are almost beside the point. Spend even a minute watching the numbers cascade and you are sure to be convinced – if you weren’t already – that Social Media is a communications channel (or group of channels) that marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you are marketer with a small company and a small budget, Social Media is perfect for you. If you are just starting out, take the simple advice that you’ll get from everyone: listen first.

And if you would like to learn about a Social Media marketing program exclusively for local merchants, feel free to get in touch with us here at Zavee.

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