POWER OF FREE! #8: The New Era of Marketing in Intelligent Content Marketing: The Times They Are a Changing

Here’s the problem, right? we as consumers, we understand what modern modern communication technologies are all about, because we use them day in, day out. And we’re constantly exposed to what it’s all about.

But the industrial economy still looms writ large in everything that we do. Because the vast majority of the established commercial organizations that control vast swathes of our Western AI first world economies, they haven’t understood that things have changed. And consequently, this represents a fantastic opportunity for people like you, and then the people like me to come along. And just kind of reinvent the way that things are. Because these big organizations simply don’t have the means internally to reinvent themselves, they’d have to cannibalize their revenues that have to be come businesses that they are not. And the literature goes on forever and ever and ever and ever, about how it’s almost impossible for larger organizations to respond to the realities of change. So the new era of marketing is essentially seamless customer experiences.

This is what we all need, right? When we are looking for someone to supply us with a service or a product, we’re looking for an opportunity to be respected to get what we need know that if there’s issues are going to be resolved, that we as humans can be connected to properly. And so you look at the organizations that are absolutely doing this better than anybody else in the world today. Zappos, as anybody ever heard of Zappos? Yeah. Okay, well, that was basically an American organization, it’s now owned by Amazon. And what they do is they retail shoes via the internet. And you say, to sell How the hell do you retail shoes via the internet? Well, they developed a business model where essentially, you can go onto their website, you can then look for the stuff you’re interested in, then you call into the company, and you will then have a conversation with a customer service representative.

And that customer service representative will spend whatever amount of time is needed to be spent with you dealing with your various requests for shoes. And I think there was an instance of one guy was on the phone to one particular customer for 11 hours sometime in the last 12 months. And they pride themselves on this this level of service, understanding the the desire, the desires of the customers that they’ve got. And so if you if you see here, they their main mission is to deliver happiness. And over to the right, you can see how the internal policy, if you can call it that has been constructed so that everyone who works in Zappos understands what the rules of engagement are. So there’s no confusing what’s required to deliver happiness in that context. And by the way, if you don’t know how they deliver the shoes, essentially, after you’ve finished ordering the shoes, you then get them all sent to you, it’s completely free, you get to try them on your own time in the comfort of your own home.

And then when you’ve decided what you want to keep you keep them and those that you want to send back, you send them back completely free of charge. And that sounds Zappos have delivered a customer service experience that is in tuned with the realities of the connection economy. Now, there’s another example that we’re all familiar with. And it’s sort of launched itself in my psychology over the last 10 years or so. Does anybody remember what life was like before Starbucks in Hong Kong? I suppose you all go out and have your meetings and you can trust that there’ll be a Starbucks in the location that you need to have a Starbucks and you can go in and there’s nobody pushing you out over time. You can spend as little or as much as you like, or do spend nothing. A lot of people do spend nothing. But Starbucks has been designed to deliver an experience. Of course, they retail coffee at the end of the day and salt and other drinks.

But again, if you see here, how they have how they teach this in us, in a sense, the DNA of what the Starbucks experience is when Starbucks staff are interacting with customers, never mind what’s been done in terms of the design of the experience. But you can see here there’s a certain sort of, you know, psychology that says we’re dealing with Humans, and we as humans need to be dealt with in a particular way based on respect and based on the human condition. And this is what Starbucks have done.

Now I’ve cited two examples there of customer services in the internet. I want to talk about a kind of a digital service where they’ve got it right. It’s a very, very simple idea. But they’ve got it right. I’m sure everyone has heard of Netflix, right? Yeah. And I’m sure you’ll realize that you can’t get Netflix in Hong Kong yet. It’s a pain, it’s a complete pain. However, you can go to a website called unblock us. And you can buy for less than $5 a month access to basically a proxy server through a VPN or otherwise. And that will then allow you to access the Netflix, US website. And then you can subscribe there, and you can have access to the Netflix products. Fantastic. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found dealing with technology companies via the web a complete pain, because they simply in the main don’t understand what it’s like to be a consumer.

Because if you’ve got a propeller in your head, you think about the world in a certain way. Now, what’s really good about this little service that costs less than $5 a month, on blockers is that they’ve understood that, that a human being when they’re using their service wants to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s access Netflix, they’re not really interested in anything else. And in order to access Netflix, there’s a few things that you need to sort of master on their website. And if you look at this, they’ve kind of got it right. There’s a couple of things here that, you know, alert you to the technological side of you wanting to use a service, not a big deal. And then your account details. And then here, your subscription. So this is what it costs. As it happens, this one is active for now. But I’ve set the instructions not to renew. But at some stage in the future, I’m going to want to change those instructions. So instead of like PayPal historically have always done or I think they’ve improved things now hiding things in the guts of the technology and the website and you’re never quite sure how to get there.

These guys have figured it out. They figured out that somebody might change their mind about accessing Netflix through Hong Kong, and they might want to use the unblocker service again. So here’s a little reverse cancellation button, one click and you’re back in business. Really simple stuff. Because these guys are delivering an experience and they’ve understood what it is that people need to get from them.

THE REST OF THE SERIES