Stand Out by “Liking” Them Before They “Like” You. It’s Basic #RonR!
Ted Rubin
I am confused. Every day brands and marketers are spending millions trying to get you to use, keep using, and share that you love their brands. But why aren’t they doing everything they can, and using some of those millions to do it (probably way less than they are spending on those marketing campaigns), making experiences with their brand remarkable? Opportunities to do this are given to brands each and every day and they simply, turn their heads, rave about their latest and great “campaign’ as if it were a military conquest, and pass up ways to really create customers for life.
I have been meaning to write this post for a while, and then today my friend, and brilliant marketing creative Bryan Kramer, founder of PureMatter, mentioned via Facebook a “remarkable” experience he just had with Hertz and it got me fired up again.
In my opinion, the best example of these missed opportunities are hotels. People leave things in their rooms all the time. The hotels know everything there is to know about most of us, especially those of us who travel frequently and are their potential best customers. Also, we are business people who have influence upon where others stay when they travel either as influencers with our companies as executives, or since we come into contact with so many and can so easily share great experiences, not only via our now easy to access social networks, but face-to-face each and every day.
Why do they rarely, if ever, reach out and tell us we left something, and then even better, send it to us free of charge? Hotels wait for you to call, then leave you on hold forever while they look, then most often they tell you they have it and you can come get it next time you are in town. If you are lucky they will take your FedEx # and ship to you. When I recently asked the GM of a major international hotel about this, while discussing with him how to build advocacy, he said this is an old legacy policy from when hotels were afraid to call the homes of male travelers whose wives may or may not have known they were at the hotel. This has to be a policy that became irrelevant at least over 20 years ago.
Every hotel now has direct email addresses, loyalty program info, mobile phones, etc. This is absolutely the BEST way to create loyalty, sharing, goodwill and advocacy I can imagine. How happy would any traveler be getting this call and the hotel then shipping it at their cost? Talk about a shareable moment, talk about the utter joy of getting that message, talk about empowering their social graph to whoop it up. And it is SO easy. I have suggested this to any number of hotels and I still do not know one major hotel chain that has acted on it… not even Ritz-Carlton.
There are opportunities like this for most major brands to be “remarkable” every day, and create the Return on Relationship that enhances ROI.
Brands need to attract customers, but breaking through the clutter is challenging. Stand out by “Liking” them before they “Like” you.
Originally posted at TedRubin.com.
