By Linda Forrest
Let me preface this by saying that I love Garth Brooks. I think that truly, beyond being a spectacular entertainer, he’s an exceptional human being, devoted father and just seems like an all around wonderful person. I’m very excited that he’s announced his un-retirement and wish him every success in all his future endeavors. I saw him in concert and sat way in the back, but it was one of the best live shows I have ever seen – and I’ve seen hundreds, if not more than 1,000 shows – and he rocked the socks off every single person in that stadium.
Yet, whomever is counseling him on PR tactics dropped the ball in a big way earlier this week when he announced his coming out of retirement. One would hope that, given there were years to plan an announcement such as this, the fact that the news media is instantaneous and voracious wouldn’t slip by whomever planned his announcement. An announcement of this nature, from the most successful solo artist of all time, the man who’s sold more records than anyone – including Elvis, the Beatles, and Celine Dion – since they started tracking record sales with Soundscan, was bound to attract unparalleled attention. And they flubbed it.
My understanding is that he did a news conference in the morning, at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, to announce that he’s coming out of retirement. What he didn’t announce was any plans to do, well, anything specific. (Aside: he did, however, talk about neighbouring rights for performers, copyright issues, how downloading is killing the industry and that musicians need to rise up and regain ownership of their works–all issues near and dear to me. Swoon.)
Having watched some of the news conference, I understand that Garth wanted to announce it to those particular reporters in that particular room first, as they’ve always supported him and he wanted them to be the first to know the big news.
The media world jumped on the story and immediately it was all over the news, web sites, etc. Some of the coverage was sarcastic, saying “Garth Brooks comes out of retirement to do nothing.”
Herein lies the problem.
Later that same day, Garth announced from Las Vegas that he’s signed on for a bunch of shows at a casino, a la Celine Dion. Great! Amazing! However, half the news media is reporting that you’ve come out of retirement but got no plans. Big problem.
In my humble opinion, this two-tiered approach to his announcement was a huge PR misstep. It could have been avoided by employing one simple tactic: embargo.
You want to give the scoop to those journalists first? Fine, great. How very thoughtful. But make sure that the footage and coverage doesn’t get out until after you’ve done the second press conference, announcing your comeback shows. Otherwise, you’re in the position we’re in now, trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
The Internet is littered with articles with snarky headlines, and clumsily added “updates” that say, “oh, I guess he is doing something after all …”
A visit to his official web site confirms that it hasn’t been updated in more than a year. There’s absolutely no mention of this new stage in his career, nor of the upcoming shows, ticket information, etc.
I’m a bit flummoxed, truthfully, at how clumsily this whole thing has been handled. Because he’s been retired, perhaps he’s without management at the moment, or lacks a full-time publicist to counsel him on how best to manage something of this magnitude … That’s the only explanation that makes any sense. But still, surely there is some communications professional that’s responsible for this debacle. I’m certain that Garth is an eminently reasonable man who would face a pile of sarcastic press clippings and shrug them off, but frankly, whoever was in charge of this announcement really screwed up.
What can we learn from this episode? Careful planning is required when making important announcements. Don’t rush it, don’t go off half-cocked, make sure that you’re providing your targets with the information that they need, when they need it. Remember that the media is instantaneous – there’s no lag, no lead time on breaking stories. As soon as it’s out of your mouth, it’s in the media, the public record, and there’s no taking it back or qualifying it. It’s a lot harder to refine a message once it’s out there.
The tickets for Garth’s comeback are sure to set records in terms of how quickly the shows sell out, and rightly so. Let’s hope that he uses some of the proceeds of the concerts to get proper communications counsel on staff.
By Linda Forrest
The Huffington Post is getting a lot of virtual ink about the fact that they are A/B-ing headlines in real time – offering one headline to half their readers, another to the other half, determining which one is the most effective in getting people to click, and adopting it as the one that everyone sees. Brilliant use of real-time analytics and giving the people what they want.
By Linda Forrest
This Thanksgiving weekend, my family attended a pottery sale just outside my husband’s hometown. There were lots of beautiful pieces and the weather was perfect to wander in the outdoor tent, watch a potter at work and debate whether to buy this piece or that for Christmas gifts. How did we hear about it? We have good friends who attend every year and, having admired their bounty from this sale, we finally managed to attend this year. I expect it won’t be the last time we do so.
Similarly, we attended a pumpkin patch to select a gourd worthy of being our Jack-o-lantern. How did we select what patch to go to? We had a recommendation from friends about one they’d been to and liked.
As ardent movie fans, especially of the horror genre, my husband and I eagerly await the showing of the new horror movie Paranormal Activity in a theatre near us. The movie is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project in a number of ways, but for this blog’s purposes the most relevant is the huge word-of-mouth marketing campaign that the movie has undertaken, and the large numbers of people flocking to see it because they’ve heard from their friends and other taste-makers that it’s a rollicking, scary good time. The folks behind the movie used the internet to best advantage, asking for 1,000,000 votes to secure nationwide distribution for the film. It passed that mark on Friday. There’s nothing like a good horror movie around Halloween, so here’s hoping that the movie makes it to Ottawa in the next few weeks.
In today’s day and age where the proliferation of marketing channels and media messages is at an all-time high, it’s interesting to note that our purchasing decisions are still so heavily influenced by word of mouth. The best way to ensure good word of mouth is by providing excellent goods and services along with superior customer service. If you have these elements well in hand, your customers will happily spread the good word.
By Francis Moran
I write an awful lot on this blog about customer service, mainly lousy customer service. Like most consumers, I run into my share of companies whose customer-service posture screams at me that they just don’t give a damn about keeping me as a customer. Having a blog gives me a soapbox from which to rant about them but given that this is supposed to be a blog about marketing, merely ranting would not meet our editorial mandate.
So my preoccupation with customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the centre of the universe that they actually are.
Sadly, far too many companies pay only lip service to this.
Last night, my wife and I had an experience that showed us the other side of the equation.
It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday but my wife was in Houston at a trade show so we planned a belated celebratory dinner for last night. We chose to go to Play Food and Wine, an Ottawa eatery we had heard a lot about, whose chef and founder we liked, but that we had not yet managed to try. Reservations were made, nice clothes were donned and off we went.
The first bit of unusual customer service should never have been noteworthy at all. We were greeted immediately upon arrival — a rare enough occurrence at restaurants these days — and they offered to take our coats! I know, that used to be standard operating procedure at restaurants but, upon reflection, I had trouble remembering the last time that had happened to me.
Upstairs we went, drinks were ordered and we looked over an imaginative menu of tempting dishes fitting Play’s tapas-style approach of small plates designed to be shared. We made a few selections, and our waiter brought out the first two, reserving the third one until we had finished off the first two.
Unfortunately, my wife, who had risen at 4am and had been spent much of the day traveling home on bumpy little planes, unexpectedly developed a wonky tummy just as our first courses were being served. She bravely tried to eat a bit but I ended up clearing off both plates as she waited in vain for her stomach to settle. Since it was clear she wasn’t going to be feeling better any time soon, we explained the situation to our waiter and asked him to hold off on our third plate if he had not already ordered it. Clearly thinking that I still deserved to have dinner, he said he could get it on our table within five minutes but I declined, saying it really would be best if we just grabbed our bill.
He was solicitous and attentive at every stage, occupied solely with our well-being, and so he should have been, given the consummately service-oriented business in which he worked. But then he went above and beyond, and here’s why I must sing the praises of Jordan, our waiter last night at Play.
He brought our bill, telling us that he had not charged for the glass of bubbly my wife had barely touched. Very nice gesture.
But wait, there was more.
When he brought back my credit card and slip to sign, he also brought me a small sampler of the hanger steak I had been very much looking forward to having as our third dish. Just enough for me to relish the dish; not so much that my wife had to wait more than a few minutes for me to finish it off.
With a few small gestures, Jordan raised our experience at Play, disappointingly foreshortened though it might have been, from the merely satisfactory to the extraordinary. As soon as I publish this post, I intend to call Play and bring all this to their attention. Meanwhile, my wife has made us a fresh reservation for Saturday night, when I hope we get Jordan again. Although, given the generally fine service we received from everyone else at the restaurant plus the fact that Jordan was empowered — that’s the key word, by the way, when it comes to superior customer service — to go the extra mile for us, I’m sure that whomever is our waiter at Play will deliver the same exemplary customer service.
By Linda Forrest
I dipped back into my former life for a night last week when I went to Toronto to see U2 at the Rogers Centre. It was incredible.
We were lucky enough to have general admission tickets that enabled us to get as close as we wanted to to the stage, which was close. In order to do so, though, we waited in line outside of the venue for most of the day. Thank heaven for the PDA or it would have been considerably more challenging to fill the time. Liveblogging the lineup would have been far too boring for anyone not there (it was pretty boring in the lineup itself) but it was great to be able to check emails, Tweet when the mood struck, and catch up on online news.
When my phone worked, that is.
Having a Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network outside (and later inside) the Rogers Centre, one would think that reception would be stellar, that the data network would be lightning fast. One would be wrong.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the fact that Blackberry was sponsoring the U2 tour impacted the service. Anecdotally, those attending the show who were using Blackberries didn’t seem to have the same frustrating lack of network access that we on the Rogers network did. Good to know that Elvis Costello could check his emails on his Blackberry with impunity while the rest of us with a Rogers account had to be contented with just basking in the glow of the many Rogers’ logos that surrounded us, rather than a functional network.
More than once in surveying round-ups and reviews of the show, I came across sentiments similar to “Did your Rogers iPhone on the Rogers network work at the Rogers Centre tonight? Mine didn’t.” The company, which struggles with its reputation as a reliable service provider, something we’ve addressed at other times on this blog, missed a golden opportunity to knock it out of the park, a park that was filled with 58,000 U2 fans, two nights in a row, that in today’s era of social media and pervasive user-created content would be sharing their experience at the show, something that extends beyond just the performance of the band itself.
Image: Open Clip Art Library.
