Scott BC (before coffee)

I have a morning ritual that I know many of you share. Coffee around here is a bit like a religion. You choose your brand, you pick your favorite, and then you stick with it. In the Toronto area, Tim Horton’s is the church of coffee. It is a part of the culture up here, part of the vocabulary. When you say you’re going for coffee you go to ‘‘Tim’s’’ or you’re going to go to ‘‘Horton’s’’

I’m sure you have your own coffee chains in your area that have the same kind of following. They become a part of our routine. This has to be the ultimate goal for a business, whether it is service- or product-based. Work to become a part of somebody’s routine. If you can, it is worth an incredible amount of money. The lifetime value of each and every somebody who spends $2 a day with your company is incredible. Think about that for a second—$2 a day equals more than $700 a year. Over 10 years you’re looking at more than $7,000 in revenue from one person. Companies have a vested interest in making sure you become a ‘‘regular’’ and you should be working hard to make your customers lifelong clients. Unfortunately, just like many personal relationships, when you become used to one another you take each other for granted, and companies do this far too often with loyal customers.

Tim Horton’s had me. I was loyal as could be. But recently I have done something I never thought I would do. I changed brands. Being a loyal Tim Horton’s customer, almost every day I would go and get my coffee from them. I didn’t even think about it—that is just what I did. When any other coffee company came into the area, they were an afterthought. No way a new company was going to change my habit.

Slowly something happened. I started noticing cracks in the armor of my habit.

One misstep or one small issue will not lead to somebody changing a day-to-day habit. But when you begin to add up enough of those small things you open up the door to your competition. It is not usually extreme customer service issues that drive people away.

So here is the story of the small things that led me away from Tim Horton’s. First, the servers wouldn’t stir my coffee. The coffee was inconsistent, a small thing, but one that I know my fellow coffee drinkers out there will understand.

When you buy your coffee at the drive-through and start to drink it after you’ve pulled a mile or two away and find that it was not made or stirred properly, the experience is hurtful. For people like me who take three sugars in their coffee and order the same coffee every day, I really do notice the difference when it isn’t made properly. Similarly, when there are mistakes in the order, when I can taste cream instead of milk, when there is sweetener instead of sugar, your customer will notice. These are little things. Mistakes happen, of course, but when they start happening more and more your customer begins to wonder if this is how service will always be. Then the customer begins to doubt the quality of your service or product. This doubt creates a space where your customer is open to try something new.

Got gap?

Picture the image of a gap. It starts as a tiny crack. Your loyal customer has always been happy with your product or service and then slowly small doubts add up and cracks begin to form. Until one day, the experience gap grows just big enough for one of your competitors to get through. The experience gap is the space between the best experience your customer has had with you and the worst. Ideally this gap doesn’t exist or is as small as possible.

Businesses need to make buying their products easy. This was another issue with Tim Horton’s that led me away from being a loyal customer. The company does not accept debit card payments. So their customers cannot pay for their coffee and doughnuts with a bankcard. This is rare today. As a matter of fact, the only reason I would ever take money out of the bank was so I could buy coffee from Horton’s. (I think the only two businesses in the world that do not accept bank cards are Horton’s and drug dealers. Although I think some of our local drug dealers here will take checks.)

Now the extra inconvenience of taking out cash was okay when my coffee was perfect, but adding this to the frequency of mistakes in my order was getting to be too much. Add in some other things I put up with in the name of my favorite coffee, such as the cumbersome lid that was impossible to open while driving, and the long wait times, and I was really open to the competition. I had been a loyal customer for 20 years. I figured that over the past 20 years I have spent upward of $15,000 with the company. I was at that point where all of these small negative experiences had come together, the perfect storm point, and I was open to give something else a try. It takes a lot for somebody to change anything, let alone change a part of their daily routine. I didn’t really do it consciously, it just happened. All that it was going to take for another company to earn me as a new customer was quality that matched what I was used to and that gave me more convenience.

Enter in McDonald’s.

I was already a McDonald’s fan. The company didn’t have to begin at the start with me or get me to buy into its brand. But I didn’t buy coffee there. My first real job was working at McDonald’s when I was 15. As far as I could see back then, the only people who bought coffee at McDonald’s were senior citizens at six in the morning. But now McDonald’s was on a mission to prove that its coffee was worth buying on its own, a bold task considering the market already included heavy competition from Horton’s and Starbucks.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have even thought of trying the McDonald’s coffee let alone of switching over to it, but I had gotten to the breaking point as a customer. I was willing to at least try something different. Tim Horton’s was taking my business for granted, but McDonald’s was working for it.

McDonald’s had a promotion to launch its coffee and it was giving out free coffee to anybody during certain a certain time. So this was going to be the time I was going to try it. Unfortunately the lineup of people to try the coffee when they found out it was free could have rivaled lineups for rides at Disney World. So I decided to hold off on giving it a try. A few weeks later I finally went in and tried it.

Compared with Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s had the same, if not more, drive-through locations, just the kind of convenience a lazy man like myself was looking for.

At this point the quality was important—no matter how much convenience or customer service I got, at this point if the product wasn’t of the quality that I liked I wouldn’t switch to it. This is really important to note, quality is always important! No matter how much marketing or UnMarketing you do, it doesn’t make a difference if your product or service doesn’t stand up. So I order the coffee and go to pay for it and the server takes my bankcard! I am allowed to use my bankcard to pay for the coffee—McDonald’s earned one bonus point.

I get the coffee and I see that the coffee cup is double walled— meaning I don’t have to put a sleeve on it! I don’t have to ask for a second cup! McDonald’s execs have spent some time thinking about their products and their customers and thought, ‘‘Hey, coffee is hot, people don’t like to burn their hand’’ and come up with a solution—a double-walled cup. Genius.

I went to open it in my car and the lid was amazing. You can open it with one thumb and it pops and locks open—no mess, no burned fingers, and another bonus point. The ease and convenience of the cup itself really improved my experience.

The location near my home also has a secret weapon. His name is David. At the Iroqouis Shore Road location, in Oakville, Ontario, David is the guy you talk to in the morning in the drivethrough. He’s kind, considerate, happy but not the ‘‘in your face’’ that makes you hate him in the morning. Heck, he even makes the add-on suggestion of a muffin a pleasant occurrence. It’s gotten to the point that I will go out of my way in the morning to have David serve me. Great service and a great new product. I never would’ve even known if it hadn’t been for the ‘‘dropping of the ball’’ from the where place I was loyal.

This is exactly what your company does not want. You do not want your long-time loyal customer be dissatisfied too many times and now in the hands of the competition and very, very happy. I then tasted the coffee and it tasted great.

I get no reimbursement from McDonald’s to say that I am not their affiliate. In all honesty, the coffee tasted great, even better than what I was used to. That did it. And now I look for McDonald’s when I’m wanting a morning coffee or on the road. I may be just one customer but my lifetime value is $20,000 or $30,000. How many people will it take for Tim Horton’s to realize that understanding the needs and wants of the marketplace is a good thing to do all the time?

You need to know if your customers are happy, and if they aren’t you need to know why and how you can change it. You need to know where you stand in the eyes of your customers. Are they happy, are they ecstatic, or are they just there holding on until someone better comes along? You do not want your brand to be in that zone with current customers where the experience gap has left a space for the competition. You cannot be complacent or inattentive leaving your hard-earned market ripe for the picking.

Do you have any stories about switching as a customer because you felt taken for granted? Add it in the comments below!

And if you pre-order UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” now for 34-37% off you’ll also receive, at no extra charge, two hugs, 3 fist bumps and a high-five! 

(Fellow Canadian/Horton’s folks can pre-order here )

Long hair can help hide a huge cranial circumference

Fast forward to the present day: The encyclopedia has been replaced by Wikipedia, The Big Book is now called The Internet, and the Yellow Pages are called Google. Yet, many businesses and phone directory sales reps continue to use these big hunks of paper and try to justify it.

I’ve had this debate with many people about businesses using tools like the Yellow Pages. Most people say it’s a great door-stop, booster seat or a thing to beat people with when they don’t pay up on a gambling debt (@EricaDurst inspired use), but let’s look at the case that most people say justifies using them: “They work in some markets! People still use them! Like old folks, shut-ins and people who are still locked into AOL contracts!”

So let’s roll with that: people who still potentially use them. I have a few issues with this way of thinking…

1. You’re aiming at the bottom of the barrel: No, I’m not saying people who use them are the lowest of the low, it’s that they’ve gone through every other resource that influences them to potentially buy before pulling out the directory. Have a look:

This is the Hierarchy of Buying I came up with 5 years ago after surveying a thousand or so people on how they hired a service provider. So your potential customer doesn’t already have a provider, doesn’t know anyone who could perform the service, doesn’t know anyone who knows anyone and hasn’t even heard of anyone in the field. So no relationships, no word-of-mouth. Nothing. (I should really make a new one, since Google would rank above Yellow Pages.)

2. Paper spam: Email spam works on the premise that if you blast it to a million people, a fraction of a fraction may be in the market for the product and a fraction of that may even click. Phone directories work on this same premise. 1.6 billion pounds of paper per year are used to produce the 500 million directories that go out in the United States every year in the hopes that you may be in the market for one of the 2,000 categories of businesses that are listed. It’s spam at its finest. You didn’t opt-in, the majority of people don’t use it, many not even taking it out of the plastic. Instead it ends up in landfill, might get recycled or thrown at random phone company trucks that drop them off. Sadly I don’t see them ever going opt-in, since like most things in the print industry, they charge due to bloated “circulation” numbers and I estimate the number of people who would actually ask for it at 14, give or take 12. Makes you want to go out and hug a tree and then go here to opt-out of them!

3. Price/Competition Sensitivity: The lower down on the hierarchy of buying you are, the more you’re up against lowest-price seekers and competition. It becomes a competition of who can have the most AAAAA’s in their legal name, just to rank as the first in their section, or who can put the biggest ad beside the rest of their competitors. It fascinates me that businesses pay good money to be listed next to all of their local competition. Since you have no clout/trust with the potential customer, the first and main question usually revolves around price. You instantly make yourself a commodity.

4. Lack of updates: Since they come out from a provider once a year, once you place an ad, that’s it for the next year. No testing on which ad converted to leads better, unless you do it on a year-to-year basis. That would mean to do a proper test, using three different ads, it would take you years to get any relevant comparative data. That’s like walking to Los Angeles from New York to see how your product is doing.

5. A dying market, literally: Through my totally non-scientific opinion, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the amount of people who use a phone book to look for a service provider goes up with the age demographic. Hell, even seniors are ditchin them to jump online. According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, 45% of seniors over the age of 70 are online. Even 27% of those over 76 are surfin the Interweb tubes. Since the average life expectancy is around 80, I’m not sure who you’re aiming for. Those over 80? Go get em! Just make sure you buy the big ads with large font.

I understand there is still a lot of money to be made by businesses that aim for the bottom, when people have exhausted every other resource, but even those people are using Google at that point, and you can track your clicks, and have a concrete ROI on it.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

Some other great posts about this:

Dear YellowBook: Why? – You must read this one, not just for the post, but the angry comments that were later found out to be actual employees of the YellowBook. Craptastic. Go get em Nicole

Yellow Pages Suck – Great post by Jim Brown (no, not that Jim Brown)

We Still Use Old Media – This picture sums it all up. Also made me snot laugh. Thanks @ShaneGibson

Do the New Rules of Marketing Apply Worldwide? – Great video by David Meerman Scott

Fast-forward to today. It’s happened. I signed the book deal and even have a potential cover that may also double as a guide on how to market to the United Nations.

So here we are. This dream is about to come true. And I’m scared sh#%less. I’m not scared because I don’t know what I’m talking about, frankly I’m over-confident in that. I know my stuff, I know it works. Neither am I scared that 60,000 words are due by January 15th and I haven’t started (Ok, may have just changed my pants because of that, but I’ll get it done).

So what is it? What am I scared about? I’m glad you asked, my beautiful reader (I also add Rational Thought to each section to show what I “know” about that stated fear, yet it still lingers):

1. Leaving something out: I can see it now. I get my copy from the publisher and say “Nooooooooooooooo! I forgot the section about riboflavin! (of course it won’t be about riboflavin, but if I knew what section I was going to forget, I wouldn’t be forgetting it. Stick with me here)

Rational thought: I’ll never write a book that contains everything, it’s a snapshot. Plus when it goes New York Time Best-Seller, I’ll put that stuff in the sequel “UnMarketing 2: If you believed the first one, wait until you get a load of this crap!”

2. Leaving someone out: I could probably fill 10,000 of the words with people I need to thank for helping me along the way (Holy Thundercats! I may be on to something here. Only 50,000 words to go now!) No one gets to any point in business or life without being influenced by others, nor are any ideas 100% original. It scares the mustard out of me that I may forget someone. From bloggers to people on Twitter, friends, co-workers, colleagues, jackass PR people from Vegas (ok, just one) and my family, leaving out one of them would do a great disservice to everything you all have given me.

Rational thought: No one would go “The Shining” on me if I didn’t mention them. Although my assistant has earned that right to break through my door with said axe if I leave her out. She has to put up with me daily. You don’t show appreciation by putting them in a book section, you do by giving back in different ways to them what they’ve given to you.

3. I’m not a writer: At least, not by trade. I have the highest respect for “real” writers. You know, the ones that do it as a craft. The ones that when you read what they wrote, you get goosebumps, or a “WOW” when you read it. I’m a hack at best when it comes to the craft. I’ll write this blog post, publish it, then wait for someone to tell me about a spelling error or how to write it gooder (see what I did there? I lol’d writing it) I admire great writers. When I read something that Jen Wright has written, I’m in awe how it reads. I mean she could write something about muffins and their impact on the end of the cold war and I’d be all over it like a kid on a candy cane go kart.

Rational Thought: I was signed by the publisher because they saw something in my style, my brand and my audience reach. More importantly one of the reasons people read what I post/tweet/rant is because of my style. Admire others but don’t try to be them.

4. No one is going to buy it (note to Shannon, my editor at Wiley, please don’t read this part) My fear back from the music business days is what if we book a show and no one comes? What if I write this book and no one buys it? Sure, mom will buy one, I’ll buy 10 copies just to make it’s an “Amazon Best-Seller” under the sub-category of “Books-> Business-> Marketing-> Canada-> Toronto-> Yiddish” but really, what happens if this bad-boy just flops? I do the UnBook Tour of tweet-ups around the continent and it’s me and the bartender?

Rational thought: People really connect with the topic of engagement, of authentic marketing and this book is being written at the right time by the right guy. (Please don’t ask for my advance back Shannon, I already spent it)

5. Writing it: Ok, I lied. I have to write 60,000 words in less than a month. What if I get sick? Writer’s block? Why am I writing this post instead of the book?

Rational thought: Finally, last week I sat down with Karen (my assistant of awesomeness) and wrote every topic on post-it notes. Concepts were on blue ones, good examples of the concept in yellow, bad in green, tools in purple. Then I put it on a MindMap (click it to see the full version). I used FreeMind to make it.

What do you think? Anything on the mind map missing? Have you had these fears writing a book? Please leave a comment! And of course if you want to stay up-to-date on the book progress, subscribe to the blog updates/UnNewsletter, top-right corner of this page!

UPDATE: My man, and fellow under-the-deadline author, Jim Kukral mentions in the comments “One of the reasons I love the Web so much is that when you make a mistake or want to add something, you can go in and change it.”

Bingo.

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