heyrobertdavis

High-end kitchens: I'm not the only sucker

2007-04-12T07:37:00.000-04:00

I try to avoid posting on purely personal stories unless I can find some relevance for a larger audience. Finally, Consumer Reports has given me the green light to blog on my disappointments with high-end kitchen appliances. In an upcoming article, (described by MediaPost here) CR will publish an indictment of high-end appliances based on more than 5 million product reports.

And I thought it was just me.

Appliances in my new kitchen that are too unreliable to ever merit consideration for re-purchase:

ICON Electrolux fridge: icemaker replaced twice, still doesn't work
Wolf gas range: parts fall apart; multiple repairs
Fisher and Paykell dishdrawer dishwasher: sigh. Finicky and doesn't wash dishes well.

What's your experience been?

Going for baroque

2006-12-16T15:38:00.000-05:00

As I was making a big 'ol Christmas order on Amazon, including a couple different shipping addresses and a mix of wrapped and not-wrapped presents, I was surprised when I realized that I hadn't done anything other than One-Click in a good, long time. What a shock -- the Amazon checkout process has become so complex, so rife with the possibility of error, that it had me tearing out my hair. I'm a User Experience professional, and probably more adept than the average human at figuring these things out, and I was completely baffled at time. I found myself backtracking to indicate multiple shipping addresses. Missing gift wrap options. My annoyance level was about what it would have been standing in line at the mall and the post office, back in the day.

Finally, I just gave up, and called my mom to tell her to giftwrap her own gift. Touching, no?

I used to work for Jay Chiat in the late '80s at Chiat/Day. The agency was embarking on a string of mergers and acquisitions, and Jay was fond of saying that "we'll grow until we suck."

Amazon, you're there.

Happy holidays!

New plan for automaker profitability: eliminate dealer satisfaction surveys

2006-11-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

Is there an aspect of marketing more perverse than the automotive dealer satisfaction survey? If so, let me know about it.

After having a dealer service your car, they inform you that if you're surveyed later, any rating lower other than a "5" -- a perfect score -- is a failure. And you are offered a free oil change to give them a 5. If what the dealer tells you is in fact true, than the dealer's scores are not a diagnostic tool for the manufacturer to use in improving dealer service; they're simply a blunt cudgel to be used as punishment. (Another instance of the rampant trend in "zero tolerance" policies.)

The upshot: the data is utterly fallacious, and isn't being used to discover and report on actual drivers of satisfaction for the purposes of performance improvement.

What do GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, and so on pay for this farce every year? There must be a better way to spend that money in order to drive customer satisfaction. How about a real diagnosis of satisfaction drivers -- and a real program to help and incent dealers to deliver on them?

Who has the courage to break from the pack?

Chief Whatever Officer

2006-09-25T20:35:00.000-04:00

James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pines II, authors of The Experience Economy, suggest that companies create and staff a position for a Chief Experience Officer (CXO), arguing that businesses must integrate experience management in one (or more) of four ways:

Experiential marketing
Customer experience management
Online user experiences
Experience lines of business

In their recent article Wanted: Chief Experience Officers in Event ROI they mostly advocate for the latter construct: CXOs should go off and "...develop, manage and refresh a portfolio of paid-for experiences… created specifically to generate new sources of revenue and profits in an increasingly commoditized world."

I find this to be a truly curious prescription for success. Isn't setting the bar for experience at designing paid experiences the ultimate in high-end cop-outs? E.g., a business with no chance of becoming a "paid experience" might as well not even try. We shouldn't let business owners and managers off so easily -- anyone responsible for a P+L, a customer segment or customer-facing process should be able to articulate how they are improving the overall economics of their business by improving the experience. Creating a new title with a new mandate to create new businesses that may or may not link to the core mission of the enterprise itself is nothing but an exercise in distraction from the hard and sometime dull work of making your business better.

Think about it this way... suppose Home Depot decided to create paid experiences... how about trips to the Pacific Northwest to cut and mill your own lumber? It's a facetious example, but how far would you have to go with it to be able to calculate the difference in return between that exercise, and an alternative in which you optimized the Home Depot experience for the tens of millions of customers in the store every day -- actually, you'd just have to go to Lowes, who have found that women prefer a slightly more comfortable and well-organized store with bathrooms that don't look like they belong on a construction site.

Experience can be a real differentiator, but the notion that there is an infinitely scalable market in paid experiences in our real-world service economy is, well, a setup to a relatively painful experience for the CEO who approves it.

Uh... sure, forward our email -- but not so much!

2006-09-01T15:51:00.000-04:00

Full disclosure: I've ragged on Starbucks before for not thinking through the customer communications email program. So this story on MediaPost kills me -- apparently 'bux sent out an email for a free iced coffee to friends and family -- and then was shocked (shocked!) when it got forwarded all over the country. They quickly killed the program.

What aspect of viral did these guys miss? Strong brand esteem, high passalong value, low barriers to forward. It's a perfect value-based viral setup, and anybody not caught under a large, heavy rock should understand this by now.

Connecting effectively with your non-identifiable foot traffic is clearly a priority for Starbucks -- so how can they be messing it up so badly?

Seeking your feeback on, well, feedback

2006-08-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

Our user experience team recently proposed to a B2B client that we give users of their site the ability to provide feedback on individual content objects, e.g., a page, white paper, case study, etc. Based on the successes we've seen with consumers rating content, we were surprised to get quite a bit of pushback on this tactic in a B2B context. Have any experience with soliciting and acting on content feedback in a B2B setting? If so, it would be great to get your comments. Thanks in advance.

Agency.com pitches Subway; where's the meat?

2006-08-02T07:10:00.000-04:00

In a bid to differentiate itself from competitors in a pitch for the Subway business, Agency.com posted a "viral" video on YouTube. Plenty of blood has already been spilled on adfreaks and other blogs about the video itself... I can't help but thank Agency.com for confirming something I had long suspected: agencies should never assume anyone is as interested as we are in stories, concepts, songs and now videos about what we do. (Full disclosure: I run the strategy function for an interactive agency, THINK interactive, and yes, the concept of making this kind of video comes up every six months or so at our place too. So far, we've killed the beast every time.)

Back in the 1980's, I worked in direct response marketing. Every six months or so, a team would come up with a concept parodying bad direct marketing creative. ("Buy now!") Every time, it was clear that what we were dealing with was actually arrogance -- the arrogance of assuming that anyone cares enough about the marketing to differentiate between the truth and the parody.

Recently this idea (or really, lack of an idea) manifested itself in the latest BMW tv spots, in which an entire campaign was seemingly constructed around the insight that creatives sometimes get their concepts killed by client executives who don't care enough about their ideas.

Agency.com has taken it to a new level (or new low?) here. The shocking thing about this tactic isn't the lack of understanding of the true nature of viral marketing, the blatant unreality of the video (uh, if it contains video of you uploading the video, than you actually faked an upload to shoot and then later actually uploaded it, in a sort of Escher-esque loop) or the attempts at humorously badgering a Hasidic man because, apparently, he isn't just like an agency employee. No, what's really bad about this idea is that there is no idea. There's a built in assumption here that there is inherent interest in watching agencies talk about coming up with ideas, and being all crazy, with our gumball machines, thrift-store blouses, facial hair and piercings. Hey, we all have that stuff -- but it's critical to differentiate between the things that help you feel OK about what you do, and whether they matter to your audience.

I've always been of the opinion that we care far more about any of this stuff than our audiences do -- be they marketers, or eventual consumers of marketing. In a bid to look cool and current, Agency.com has gone ahead and confirmed that opinion with this overwrought, under-powered video tactic.

Off the grid

2006-07-14T22:52:00.000-04:00

We're headed out to North Truro for a week, and I'm taking a big step: leaving the laptop home. My only way of cadging a browser session will be the pathetically non-functional WAP browser on my phone, soon to be consigned to the recycling bin. (The vagaries of a semi-functioning 7 key are starting to wear me down.) No posts until we return, rested, tanned and re-connected.

Appealing to the crowd, for love and money

2006-07-14T22:46:00.000-04:00

I'm cursed with an unfortunate combination of personality traits: lots of ideas, but not a lot of entrepreneurial spirit. I've not been one to quit my job and start a company based on my own idea, or at least not yet.

I was happy to discover Cambrian House -- a site where you can post your bright ideas, have them competitively rated by other members of the site, and if your idea is highly rated, it will be developed, launched, and marketed. All you have to do is sit back and wait to collect your royalties.

Of course, the business has to be a success first. I may not get rich, but it's an interesting angle. Cambrian House is a crowdsourcing site -- soliciting not just ideas, but also many of the elements of execution, from code to logo and marketing materials.

In effect, CH supplies all the get up and go that I lack when it comes to followthrough on a bright idea. You can support my idea -- "Shared Strength" -- here. Your vote gets me one step closer to collecting my royalties... and retiring in the style of the successful entrepreneur to which I have always aspired.

How heavenly can you get?

2006-07-08T10:26:00.000-04:00

Just finished my second week at IDEO in Palo Alto. Last week we collectively synthesized the learnings from a bunch of different research processes; this week we engaged in a collaborative design process, including rapid prototyping and gathering reactions to our crude prototypes from representative members of our client’s target audience. Interesting process; I think I’ll post on it separately after a few days to digest.

In the meantime, however, another comment from the business travel front. Both weeks I stayed at the Westin Palo Alto, which is really walkable from IDEO, but is far harder to drive to than it ought to be, based on some very curious one-ways and no-left-turns. Once in your room, however, you are bound to rapidly become a fan of the Heavenly Bed. A few years ago, Westin introduced better bedding, spurring efforts to catch up in many other chains targeting the business traveler.

All in all, it’s a damn good bed. Good mattress, nice sheets, down duvet, good down pillows – its, well… heavenly, I guess, after a long day. I hadn’t stayed in a Westin in a while and the bed certainly makes a difference.

What’s new at Westin is the extension of the “Heavenly” experience into the bathroom. Dual shower heads, one upgraded towel, and a few other amenities constitute the Heavenly Bath. I’ve been back and forth over this service brand extension; on the one hand, the bed was a stunning success, and certainly created powerful equity for Westin.

On the other hand, I wonder how far that equity can – and should – be leveraged. The shower (full disclosure – I didn’t take a bath) is nice; the water was hot and plentiful, the dual shower heads were, well, nice, if a tad… excessive, and the toiletries were fine. (The snow-white bar soap was among the “creamiest” I’ve ever used – I’m sure many would give that full points for resembling the soap to be found in St. Peter’s guest half-bath.)

I’m just not sure it was transformational in the way the bed was when it came out. With the changes in the industry over the last three years or so, it’s almost more of a necessity to keep up, rather than anything even approaching a disruption.

For Westin, that’s the trap. Six months from now, will something else need to be re-designed and re-badged as “Heavenly?” As you work your way down the list, the candidates get less and less appealing. Heavenly Hangers? Hallways? How about Heavenly Health and Fitness Facilities? They’re certainly substandard in most hotels; as a service brand, I doubt Heavenly is a good fit for a workout room, even a really nice one. (OK, now I see they've got a branded relationship with Reebok for the health clubs in some hotels.)

Action plan for marketers: Have a plan for differentiation and disruption; scenario plan against future paths and what they might mean for product, service and brand evolution. Play out the possibilities – even better, use scenario planning as a way to bring together the internal constituencies responsible for delivery of every aspect of your value proposition; that is, product, service, operations, IT, and yes, marketing. Think long and hard before “badging” differentiating components of the product or service after really understanding where these ingredients fit in your overall brand strategy. (See Pepper and Rogers One to One blog for a recent dialogue on Whatever Whenever at W hotels – which yours truly sees as a classic case of setting up potential disappointment by branding a level of service that is very, very difficult to deliver consistently.)

Palo Alto, Day Two: Customer service master class

2006-06-30T09:18:00.000-04:00

After two pretty full days of synthesis and analysis with the folks at IDEO, I had to run back to the Westin and finish my piece of an RFI response we need to send out before the 4^th of July holiday. By 8 pm, local time, I was pretty well spent. Still sunny, so out (finally) for a walk and dinner.

I remembered having a great meal at Francis Ford Coppola’s bistro, Niebaum Coppola Café, when it first opened some years ago. I walked by, spotted a little table right out front, looking out on a beautiful Northern California evening… and I was in.

One great salad, a really nice piece of sockeye salmon and a few glasses of excellent Oregon Pinot later (sorry, Francis!) I reached for my wallet and discovered I’d left it back at the hotel. Embarrassing, no?

I called the waitress over, who smiled and called the manager over. And then he proceeded to give me a master class in service. He knelt down – don’t make the customer crane their neck to look up – smiled, assured me that his job was to minimize my embarrassment, and suggested that if I wanted to get my wallet, come back and pay, then that would be just fine. Smiled again and thanked me for choosing Coppola that evening.

That’s it.

I did return – nice night for a walk, though outside my hotel I met the guy who ran the airport van, and who offered to drive me over and back. I gratefully accepted, returned to the restaurant, paid, slipped the driver a nice tip and made it back to my room in about 15 minutes.

Before turning in for the night, I shot off an email to the manager, Dave Grice. I thanked him again for making a difficult situation much easier. This was his response, in part: “I view my job as one that the purpose is to make people feel at ease.”

Notice what he didn’t say: my job is to maximize the profits in the dining room, or my job is to ride herd on the waitresses and busboys, or anything else related to the operation of the restaurant as we might think about them. Of course he manages all those things – but only in the context of the diner’s experience. So they’ll have a good time. Come back. Tell their friends. Give them a good review online.

That’s customer service, imagined not as something that competes with the things you have to do to run a restaurant – but instead, envisioned as a core element of the dining experience. Thanks, Dave, for the lesson in how to do it right.

Palo Alto, Day One: Take my car, please

2006-06-30T08:44:00.000-04:00

I’m in Palo Alto with a client for a couple days, attending “research synthesis” sessions facilitated by IDEO. It’s a fascinating process, though rather Post-It intensive. (Note to self: check potential environmental impact of spike in Post-It production and consumption.)

There’s one thing about this first day that struck me even more than the process, though, and believe it or not, it’s about parking. An aside about Palo Alto: if you want to park for thirty minutes or less, it’s your kind of town. Two hours or less, they’ve got something for you, too. All day? Out of luck.

I circled, looked for a garage, felt my blood begin to simmer – the typical autonomic response of a recovering New Yorker. And then I met the IDEO account representative, and he made my problem go away.

He didn’t tell me about a lot I could drive to, or offer me an IDEO parking space. He didn’t give me advice or information to help me mitigate the issue myself.

He asked for my car keys.

He attached a small tag to my key ring with a map on one side and a blank grid on the other, to note where the car was parked and when. A small team of IDEO employees then monitors how long each car has been in its current space, then goes out and moves them to other legal spots as needed. They then note the location on the card and return it to the front desk. All day long.

And if you do get a ticket, by some strange chance, you mail it in to them and they pay it.

When I was ready to pick up my car, I grabbed my keys, noted the location, and used the map to walk the one and a quarter blocks to where it was parked.

So what, you may say?

Here’s what: service is sometimes about giving the user the tools to manage the situation themselves; sometimes it’s about making the problem just go away. IDEO has figured out that when you’re bringing people in to do creative thinking about a business problem, you’re better off making their petty problems, like parking, just go away.

Of course, part of customer service is providing feedback to improve product design so customers don’t have the problem in the first place. (Translation: build or move to a new office with a parking garage.) But hey, this is Palo Alto. A sliver of land is worth more than you’ll earn in a lifetime. And IDEO already has cool space, tailored to their needs, thank you very much.

More on the process itself next week – we’ll be back for a design workshop.

Connecting with Starbucks, Chapter Two

2006-03-30T06:19:00.000-05:00

So I got my first email from the Starbucks Customer Connections program. (earlier post)

A few comments:

Um, thanks for asking me to comment on the free coffee event at my local 'bucks. Next time can you remember to actually invite me to the event, as well? How "holistic" is this relationship, anyway? (Mirrors my original concern - byinviting me into the program based on "feedback alone," has Starbucks set themselves up for a less than complete view of the customer relationship?)
The privacy policy now links to a Starbucks policy (which, curiously, hasn't been updated since 2002) but plenty of other links, including one for helpful info about whitelisting, still take you to the email vendor. I think this is an odd choice, from a branding perspective. This is the chain that doesn't franchise; control over execution is everything to them... I'd consider extending that principle to the online environment.
Get with the program on this email layout and content design. Long, long, long. Not optimized for previewing, or for best practices re: how people read email.

Marriott: 1; Hilton: 0

2006-03-26T13:49:00.000-05:00

In a rather curious evolution of last year's stated strategy "directing general managers to give business travelers priority over leisure customers," Hilton Hotels earlier this year launched a microsite based on their "travel is a journey" brand campaign.

As a frequent business traveler myself, it's an effort that leaves me more than a little confused. OK, say I'm doing one of my Boston > Atlanta > Little Rock > Boston weeks. Just what is it that navigation choices such as "pamper", "empower" and "entertain" have to do with figuring out how I can get some sleep, reliable high-speed internet access, and a couple work-outs between meetings, flights, business dinners and the million little indignities frequent business travelers find in their average week on the road?

Contrast the Hilton site with the microsite announcing Marriott's new room designs. As a business traveler, I'll admit to not focusing all that much on the journey. At the hotel, I focus on the specifics that matter: check-in, the room, the gym, check-out. These are the reasons I've always hated Marriott hotels, frankly. Beige and brass has never been my style. Well, it seems that all that is going to change. This thoughtful tour through the important details of the new rooms is just what it might take to break my pre-disposition to Starwood hotels and get me back into a Marriott. And that's far more than I can say for the Hilton effort. And isn't converting the frequent business traveler what it's all about these days?

Action plan for marketers
Don't lose sight of your core market, why they use your category, what they think while they are using it, and how they purchase. Seem obvious? Well, yeah... but...

And as an aside, if you are going to build a Flash-heavy pig of site (ahem, Hilton...) offer a low-bandwidth version. (Thanks, Marriott.) Better yet, optimize the site to load quickly at any speed. Marriott's full-bandwidth Flash site loads in about one-tenth the time of the Hilton site.

A Venti with everything, for your email address

2006-03-17T17:29:00.000-05:00

I recently picked up a brochure at Starbucks offering a $5 stored-value card for my feedback... and when I logged on to the URL provided, I was invited to create something called a Customer Connections account. The form was quick and easy to fill out -- but where's my opportunity to provide feedback? No place to offer it. Was it worth the $5 to Starbucks just to get my email and mailing addresses, and link them to my favorite Starbucks location? I wonder. Pretty hard to understand the point -- and that's important, as consumers come to expect greater transparency in their interaction with brands, especially when asked to provide personal information.

Speaking of which, if you click the privacy policy, you go to the MIG Email Relationship Marketing site. Huh? Starbucks doesn't have their own privacy policy for email collection? For shame, guys -- this looks like amateur hour.

The votes are in

2005-12-16T21:49:00.000-05:00

Back in 1999, I led a creative team that proposed a project to then-client EMC that would place EMC storage boxes in giant glass boxes in Times Square, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, etc. -- with automatic digital cameras. Our mission: take and store a photo of every human on the planet. Just the kind of hubris that we loved back in the bubble days... as I recall, the concept was met with a blank stare and a clearing of throats.

Six years later, anyone with a PC and an internet connection (OK, that's a whole lot of us) can be Person of the Year, complete with a giant Times Square billboard, even if only for a few seconds, thanks to Time Magazine. There's a simple elegance that overlays the technical intricacy of this campaign that you just have to love... the intertwining of the virtual and the physical is truly captivating and is one of those campaigns that leaves me saying "I wish I'd done that." Kudos to Time and their agency for developing it. Try it for yourself.

Citibank's exercise in irrelevance

2005-09-27T12:05:00.000-04:00

Several years ago, I wrote a less-than-positive review of Citibank’s new (at the time) “Live richly” brand campaign, questioning the wisdom of a bank advising consumers to consume less and pursue happiness more. This from an institution in an industry most consumers see as a necessary evil, based on my own research in the retail banking category. With a business model driven not just by consumer’s savings but also by consumption – think credit-cards, home equity lines and car loans – the whole idea just seemed to push not just the limits of brand permission, but to also press the bounds of relevance and credibility. I just didn’t get it.

Three years later, the campaign is still running, so it must be effective on some set of measures. Frankly, it’s still puzzling to me, but it’s not my money, or my bank for that matter. (I'm now with Bank of America, having been through a ten-year run of bank mergers in the Boston market, from BayBank to BankBoston to Fleet and so on.) Recently I had the chance to review the websites of some retail banks, and after spending some time at the Citi site, I was left wondering just how “Live Richly” can ever be translated into an effective interactive experience.

It’s easy to think about all the ways that you could provide visitors with all sorts of advice and information about having a great, well-balanced lifestyle that's long on personal growth and short on consumption. In some of my more reflective moments, I’ve questioned my place on the economic treadmill and found myself looking online for advice on downscaling my lifestyle. (I found one site about people moving to Ohio and emulating the Amish lifestyle. “Witness” fantasies aside, I’m too into the convenience of zippers to go that far.)

However, none of this would have anything to do with the reasons I – and most bank customers – would visit a bank’s website. We visit banks to do banking, silly as that sounds. The tasks customers bring to sites tend to revolve around specific elements of their relationship to their own money – looking at balances, paying bills, making transfers, or seeing if I can find a better deal. Making electronic banking easy and productive is job one for any bank today, and the site owners at Citibank are as busy at it as those at any other bank.

But beyond that, where can they go with “live richly?” In comparison, when Citizens Bank claims they are “Not your typical bank,” they’re working within the consumer’s frame of reference, and can offer relevant proof points online such as a "One Switch" switch kits that help consumers change their bank without missing an automated deposit or payment. It’s the same strategy that drives their new branch designs, by the way – a single, simple brand promise that can be brought to life and paid off meaningfully to consumers across the range of contacts and channels consumers will have with their bank.

In contrast, Citibank clearly has not built a platform for aligning the experiences that are the bread and butter of banking relationships today. With three years of investment, it stands to reason that “live richly” must do well against brand metrics such as awareness, preference, etc., but in a business where delivering for the customer online, in the branch and over the phone is your single best bet against churn, Citibank finds itself sorely wanting.

Frank Kafka, experience designer

2005-09-11T05:11:00.000-04:00

So, like any other business traveler, I’ve been piling up the Membership Miles on my Amex card. This year for our anniversary, I thought I’d take my wife out for a weekend at the Ritz, and do it with miles. So I clicked around on their site, and was able to redeem miles for a room at the Ritz on Boston Common (highly recommended, by the way) – but had to call their 800# to do it, as the site doesn’t support online hotel reservations. OK, no problem.

Now what about dinner? L’Espalier… great place. A fistful of $50 Be My Guest certificates should do it. Oh, hey – reward not redeemable online. Had to call to get them.

A couple days later, I get an email from Amex:

Dear Cardmember, Thank you for your recent call concerning the Membership Rewards ® program. We want you to always get the most out of membership. So, we're writing to tell you about another great way to access information about the program.

The Membership Rewards Web site offers you a quick and easy way to do just about anything that's related to the program. For instance, (blah blah with some links to online redemption, etc.) So next time you want to redeem for a reward, check your point balance, or get other program information, why not explore your options. Check out the Membership Rewards Web site. It's the fast and easy online alternative, and it's available to you 24 hours a day.

Sincerely, Membership Rewards Customer Service

“Why not explore your options?” Indeed. Remember when Martin Short used to be funny – he did that corporate flack with the long cigarette and the slicked down hair, and the whole “Why don’t you ask yourself that question sometime?” routine? That's what flashed through my mind when I read this.

So I fire off an email that verges between helpful (“look at the actual web data before you decide what email to send… get some business rules, folks”) and annoyed… and in response, got this:

Dear Cardmember,

Please note that you have replied to a non-secure e-mail address that is not monitored for replies and, to protect the confidentiality of customer information and to ensure prompt processing of your inquiry, we will not be able to respond to you through this channel at this time.

In order to best service your inquiry, we ask that you call us at 1-800-528-4800 or the number located on the back of your American Express Card (24 hours a day /7 days a week). From outside the United States, please call collect 1-336-393-1111.

Sincerely,

American Express Customer Service

OK, so… you want me to call you -- or don' t you? Just what is it you want, American Express? I really can't tell – but I sure can see what you ought to be doing – looking at what you capture, what you measure, what you want to make happen, and the resulting customer scenarios, and then applying some pretty basic best practices when you execute. This is death by tactics, folks, in want of a strategy.

Intellikey: Should a smart key make me feel dumb?

2005-08-29T23:37:00.000-04:00

We’d taken office space in a very nice set of temporary office suite while our new space was under construction. In this space you access the elevator and front door with the kind of passkey system with which we’re all familiar (you swipe a thick white card over a contact for a beep and a green light.) However, the rest rooms are protected with a special “intelligent key” made by a company called Intellikey, which they purport will “preserve your security investment while providing enhanced access control.” The technology is, in fact, pretty interesting. Each “smart” key carries an individual’s access privileges so buildings don’t have to program the locks for each door. (Apparently this is something you had to do in the past, though it seems to me that cards deliver the same benefit, but what do I know.) Privileges can be turned on or off instantly. This is all good stuff if you’re in the facilities business.

But what if you’re an employee looking to, say, wash your hands? It’s something I do several times a day. Can’t help it, it just happens. Well, here’s how my super-key really works. I put it into the doorknob and wait a second or two for a beep. I then have to turn the key about ¾ of a revolution to the left, hold the key there, and use my other hand to turn the door handle about a 1/2 turn to the right and open the door. Sounds simple? Well, if I turn the key before it beeps, I’m shut out and have to start again. Turn the door handle first – same thing. Turn the key the wrong way – start over. By the way, any one of these “failures” means pulling out the key, waiting five seconds for the lock to re-set, and starting all over again.

In other words, under stress – keeping in mind this is the restroom we’re talking about – you have to un-learn a lifetime of experience with locks and keys. (Or in a NYC office building, asking the receptionist for a key to the bathroom in the hallway, each key with its attendant, low-tech anti-theft device, typically a block of wood, a big kitchen spoon, or some other object too large to slip into a pocket.) It’s a classic story in which a product is “improved” based on a great idea and compelling value proposition – “better security management for building managers” – that doesn’t consider the scenario in which the product is used. I’m no Luddite, to be sure. There are times in the progress of human development when it makes sense for all of us to buckle down and learn a new technology. Slide rules to calculators, cassettes to CD’s; in each case the user value is clear. More complicated keys to the men’s room? Here the end user value just isn’t clear, and there’s just no good reason I can see to force an employee to learn a new way to operate.

Amtrak Acela back, still broken

2005-08-20T05:19:00.000-04:00

I’m finally riding the Acela back and forth between Boston and New York City again, but I guess it’s probably no surprise to say that while the brakes may be fixed, the train is still a traveling example of unfortunate customer experience. Here’s just one example.

Back in 2001, when I regularly rode the train to a consulting job in New York, one of the first things I noticed about the train was the clumsy, jerry-built quality of the bathroom locks. They had the look of having been designed, after a fashion, by an engineering firm that spent most of their time making some kind of heavy mechanical component that sat out of sight on the bottom of a train car (brakes, perhaps?) rather than the sleek, consumer-friendly image Amtrak intended the Acela to project.

Within a month or so of the introduction of the Acela, passengers were regularly finding themselves locked in the bathroom, or even more disastrously, having the door roll open at a time when they thought they were assured some privacy. You see, the locks were so poorly designed that they failed on several fronts: passengers couldn’t figure out how to use them, which really didn’t matter much since many were broken anyway.

Fast forward to late summer, 2005. The locks have been replaced with a new, even bulkier lock, which in turn required that large notches be cut into the wall to the right of the door to accommodate the locks when the doors were open. Now visualize this – with the door closed, you stand at the sink and wash your hands. Paper towels are immediately in front of you under the mirror (whoops, didn’t mean to set off the overly sensitive motion sensor switch on the hand dryer, which happens every time due to it's too-close location, a fraction of an inch from the towels.) You dry your hands, look around briefly, and seeing a big black hole, throw in your towel.

Wrong.

By acting with the instinctual logic we bring to acts such as hand-washing, you just threw your towel into the space cut in the wall to accommodate the lock of gargantuan proportions which was re-engineered to overcome the failings of the first faulty lock "design."

Solution: freshly minted signs reminding passengers to fight their ingrained impulses and seek the trash can elsewhere. They read “Please do NOT throw trash into this space.”

Marketers and designers of experiences, ask yourselves -- if there isn't enough time to do it right in the first place, will you, inevitably, find the time to do it over instead? Paula Scher got it right: “Design is doing something right that you had to do anyway.” And by the way, when you're doing it, whatever it is, pay attention to the degree of engagement your prospect/user/customer brings to the experience, and the potential role of ingrained behavior. The Acela "when is a trash can not a trash can" experience reminds me of watching usability test participants searching on the web -- when they see an open field for text entry and a "go" button, they type in a term and hit the button. No time for the fine details, they've been taught how to behave by the preponderance of prior experience.

Neutrogena gets it right

2005-08-15T21:12:00.000-04:00

Common morning scenario for men: shower, shave, get dressed, look in the mirror and see an irritated neck, or the raw, red swelling of an ingrown facial hair. How well does the personal care industry address this problem? Well, in the shaving aisle, they have… shaving cream. Razors. Aftershave. Individual products but no solutions. Enter Neutrogena. Five years ago, the West Coast office of the agency I worked for designed a new site for Neutrogena where you could see the entire range of products in one place. At the store, they had a shampoo in the shampoo aisle, a moisturizer here, and another product over there. The website became a brand-unifying location where none had existed before.

Now Neutogena has brought that same kind of thinking to men’s toiletries. They have grouped men’s shaving and facial care products into two lines, Razor Defense and Skin Clearing, clearly aimed at what men see in the mirror. And they’ve changed the merchandising , so now when I go to the shaving aisle, I find everything that support my needs – skin wash, shave cream, facial moisturizer, etc. – grouped side by side. The scenario-driven product line names (Razor Defense, Skin Clearing) are featured prominently on the packaging, making them easy to recognize and buy. And buy them I do, because they’re not just easy to buy, they work.

It's a great example of what Mohan Sawhney, McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology at the Kellogg School of Management suggests as the outcome of the application of a “customer value mindset.” Professor Sawhney has proposed that solutions that are based on the customer’s definition of value are better positioned to create and deliver superior value to customers, and thus enable marketers to sell more deeply to existing customers. Neutrogena has accomplished that goal with me, and as far as I can see, it’s because they started their process by uncovering just what it is a man experiences in the mirror every morning, and then designing and marketing products based on that insight. Way to go, Neutrogena.