Newsletters

Scroll down for the newsletter archives.  Immediately below is the latest cover article:

Purple Cow Automotive – Finding the wow factor through Edgecrafting

by Jim Bonfield - Vice President, Business Development

People love to be experts. We all have opinions, and we love to share them. The old axiom of “please one customer and they’ll tell one person; make them angry and they will tell ten” may still hold true, but with the explosion of social networking sites, we have seen a much
greater willingness to share the good than anyone could have imagined.  This is NOT an article about Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn social networking – I am tired of the rah-rah there too. This is an article that I hope will remind you to think about your company and services through the eyes of your consumers as a way to influence what their mouths say and what their fingers may type about you, your business and services.

My favorite business author of all time is Seth Godin. He has written a number of basic,
tell-it-like-it-is works that I love: Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, and my favorite, Free Prize Inside. In his book, Purple Cow (hence my title), he uses the idea of seeing a purple cow as something that would be so unique it would literally become remarkable – as in people seeing it would feel compelled to remark on it to their friends. In Free Prize Inside, Seth talks about something he calls “Edgecraft.” According to Godin, Edgecraft is “… a methodical, measurable process that allows individuals and teams to inexorably identify the soft innovations that live on the edges of what already exists.”

My overly simplified summation of the Edgecraft concept is this: you don’t have to make a massive operational overhaul or come up with major innovations to really move the needle with your business. Less drastic changes, at the “edge,” can mean a lot. You may do better to look at what you do and how you do it, then work on tweaking those offers and processes enough to add value and improve perception in a way that moves your customer to think of you as something more than a place to get his or her car fixed.

Tweaking the “edges” of a service or product can be fun. It can provide surprising impact to your bottom line and company culture, and most importantly, it can get your customers talking about you to their friends and family. Personal experience: I use a shop that is a client of CustomerLink. Even before coming to CustomerLink, I ALWAYS tried to use small business and independently owned companies. I’m wired that way because my dad was one of these “little” guys too, and I get how hard it is to compete.

I recently went to this shop to take care of a bunch of maintenance and repair issues that had been nagging my vehicle for a while now. Every time I picked my car up from them, it had been washed and vacuumed. Even if no work was done. Wow. It’s not that I couldn’t simply pay ten bucks somewhere for the same service. What really moved the needle for me as a consumer is how I felt better about my car every time I drove away from that facility.

My car is getting up in years and mileage, and I’m kind of rough on it in general. BUT – when I have driven away from the garage, at least four times now over these past months, I LIKE my car again. I have never felt that before. It’s a small thing, I know, but the emotional bond that shop has created with me feels like… wait for it… LOYALTY. Not because they fixed my car (they actually couldn’t fix one of the issues), but because they figured out how to make me feel good about having my car fixed. HUGE difference.

Of course, I have recommended this shop to family and friends. I never say it’s because they wash my car. I do it because I feel good about that shop. Edgecrafting is a way of describing similar pursuits. Some examples of Edgecraft concepts (more can be found here
www.freeprizeinside.com):

1. Build-A-Bear Workshop sells Teddy Bears and stuffed animals. So do 10,000 other stores. However, Build-A-Bear charges people to make the bears themselves – and get them to pay more for the privilege! (Wow, I wonder if you could offer a fix-it-yourself series of classes for simple tasks…oil change, wipers, etc.? I bet if you did, you’d earn customers for the more expensive repairs that are not DIY operations.)
2. Hershey has created an experiential boutique in Times Square. There’s a machine there where people wait twenty minutes to press a button and watch machine gravity feed various Hershey candies into a bag – for twice the price of the same candy on “regular” store shelves.
3. One of my best friends, Jason Marrone, is the online marketing hotshot for Jelly Belly. One of his most successful innovations has been to simply allow customers to upload pictures or photos of their choosing which are then imprinted on the container that is used to hold the jellybeans sent to loved ones as gifts.

“Yeah, but this is just car repair."

Really? Is that all you really do? I don’t think that’s how we consumers feel about it. We don’t care that you replaced our cap, rotor, wires and plugs so much as we care that you made it possible to get our kids to school on time. You make it possible for me to take my wife on date night (not often enough by the way – can you find us a good sitter too?)

You get me to work every day.

How can you reinforce these facts in a way that make me/us feel better about your product and service? Maybe it’s not so much total car care as total life freedom.

Take a clue from Southwest… “You are now free to roam about the country…” Are they selling airline travel with long delays, security checks, swine flu sneezes, and large people flowing into your seat? Nope. They are selling the feeling of escape, adventure and wanderlust.

How can you redefine what you do to a point that influences how we feel about you as aJim Bonfield
company? Write me and let me know.

Jim Bonfield

jbonfield@customerlink.com