I went to Pavilions / Vons tonight to get balloons for my boy’s birthday morning. 10pm entry. Sign on the door says they’re open until midnight.

Very few patrons in the place – two in line, maybe. This is the Newport Beach Pavilions by Bonita Canyon. 7+ workers, one on the cash register, one bagging groceries. Several others about.

Knowing that I’m going to buy a few other things, I go straight to the cashier and box boy to get some balloons filled up while I shop (btw – I worked in a market as a jr high kid and hs freshman, so I know how cruddy retail can be).

The cashier and box boy tell me to go pound sand in no uncertain terms.

I start to leave and then ask them for their manager (I’m on the hook for birthday wake-up morning, remember). They make the call for Terii or Terrii. Lots of extra letters.

Terrii doesn’t show up, but someone else does. She’s very helpful and see’s that I’m ticked. This balloon thing is one of our traditions, so I’ve done this quite a bit over the years. I’ve seen 6am produce people fill em up.. cashiers, mangers, the whole crew. They usually make it work. Especially when there’s no one in the store.

I offered to do the balloons myself tonight. The box boy, btw, said he didn’t know how to do it. I scoffed, probably shouldn’t have.

The manager woman who eventually filled up the balloons was a true hero / heroine. That has to be said. She was great. Shoulda got her name.

Anyway – I get the balloons, thank said manager profusely, and head to check-out with my other items.

By this time, Terrii is the one at the cashier. She’s checking me out. As I’m sliding my card through the reader, the manager woman walks by. I’ve got balloons over my head, btw. What does Terrii say to the manager as she passes by?. . . “I can’t believe you filled up these balloons for this guy.”

I was stunned. I freak stared the supervisor Terrii and left the place in a bewildered haze.

As I was shopping, I kept thinking that maybe I’m the NB a-hole. Preventing these people from a clean getaway when their shifts change. But I was there 2 hrs before closing. And I was thinking about how it was one of those critical retail moments that create customers/fans for life – a father getting balloons for his son’s birthday wake-up moment.

There was a moment there when they could have been superheroes, recovering from the initial blow off and coming full force with super service. Instead I’m writing this.

I don’t really expect extraordinary things from average retail . . but with all this word of mouth (WOM) social media stuff, I thought the world might be shrinking a little and retailers changing.

Still 2nd guessing Vons Pavilions

I just got off a juicy conference call with a client and a partner. An interesting discussion came up.

The client was describing a bunch of projects they have lined up. A batch of case studies, a white paper, a data sheet for an upcoming trade show. . the typical round-up of persuasion projects.

They riffed for a bit on how the brochure/data sheet needs to be brief, because no one has time to read these days and it’s really difficult to compete for attention.

Then they said something really interesting. “We need to work on custom intros for the RFPs we’re working on. This is the one document that really has to sell – they have to read it, so the lead-in has to be really compelling. It directly impacts the sale.”

Um, yeah. This makes a lot of sense to me. People are bombarded with email newsletters, tantalizing links to content in Twitter and Facebook, magazines on their tables, and countless other “media interruptions.”

But.. they have to read closely when it counts – in an RFP. Their job depends on it, so companies throw a lot of resources and thought at RFP writing – especially on the front-end executive summary and positioning copy.

I’ve done this type of work before. I worked on a 100+pp RFP for Pitney Bowes a few years ago. They were bidding for the big law firm Latham & Watkins’ business. It was exactly this type of drill. They wanted a marketing writer to help write several sections and edit the entire document for persuasiveness, attention to detail, and consistency.

What do you think? Have you been seeing more of this kind of work? Please share your thoughts below.

The following quotes are from Richard Florida’s analysis of the current worldwide economic situation – The Great Reset. This is a fantastic book that dovetails with a lot of the things I’ve been seeing on the Web, in markets, and in other books (like Seth Godin books, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, Daniel Suarez’ Daemon and Freedom, and others).

“People will always define themselves through their consumption habits. There will always and inevitably be some element of competitiveness in our consumption that will never die, even if the rules change. .

“If, before, people trumpeted their financial success through their purchases, there’s no reason to think they won’t continue to show off what righteous and evolved new “citizen-consumers” they’ve become..

“As long as people have been trading money or goods and services, they’ve been demonstrating their unfailing ability to fall for a clever marketing pitch, and marketers know a good thing when they see it. .

“Witness The Gap’s ‘Buy Red, Save Lives’ campaign or a company like Endangered Species Chocolate, which are still designed to get people to buy things they almost certainly don’t need but that now play to their newfound identity as responsible citizens of the planet..

“We might not like to admit this about ourselves, but it isn’t so much material goods themselves that drive our consumption as the perceived status we assign to them. Largely, our material possessions and our perceived status are one and the same thing, but only up to a point.”

“A decade ago, John Seabrook identified a shift away from older forms of conspicuous consumption to new and subtler status distinctions…

“Green products have become the ultimate status goods. People buying hybrid cars are more driven by the status they confer than the fuel savings and energy efficiency they provide. Toyota Prius owners pay a significant premium over many conventional fuel-efficient cars. .

“When asked about the top motivating factors behind their purchase, the comment “makes a statement about me” was at the top of the list, while “higher fuel economy” came in third and “lower emissions” fifth, according to a July 2007 survey reported in the New York Times. (That’s probably something we should have intuited. After all, the carmakers figured out long ago that the rush to buy SUVs had less to do with safety or carrying capacity or durability than with buyers’ perception that driving an SUV conveyed an image of youth, ruggedness, and adventure.)”

Ok – I just laid a lot of quotes on you.  Here are my thoughts.

Following this same line of thinking, the new consumer is more interested in buying experiences rather than purchasing products.  This is in keeping with the consumption lifestyle trend. You are what you do more than what you are what you have.

So, what does this mean for marketers?

For one thing, that means you have to pay close attention to emotional drivers – which you should have been doing in the first place.

Either way the emotion drives the purchase.  If you buy a fancy car, you’re expressing an emotional need.

But if you go deeper into this, you need to find the motivations and pair those with the experiences.  I think this new trend toward experience as marketing or the consumer being more interested in experiences is important because really that’s all that was happening earlier, as well.

A product was purchased because of the experience it generated.  It didn’t matter that it was a physical object or nonphysical object.  A massage can produce a feeling.  A cookie can produce a feeling.  A toy can produce a feeling.

So you have to work back from the feeling of the customer to the reality of the product.  Does the product satisfy the emotional driver?  Does the products solve the pain the issue, the itch, the disturbance?

It’s also useful to pay attention to the general trend where marketers pair altruistic or idealistic/emotional causes with physical products or physical experiences or events.

What are you doing to ensure that your marketing messages are working back from the emotion to the product?  Do you have processes in place to ensure that your clients or customers are thinking about these kinds of drivers? . . whether they’re experiential drivers, lifestyle positioning, or product add-ons for specific causes, charities, or events.

Please comment below. I would love to hear from you.

And they heard two friends.. and so on, and so on..

Search Engine Land recently ran an short article posing the question: Is Trust in Social Media Dying? It’s a quick statistical look at the dip in trust across social networks.. and the problem seems to be “marketing.”

I’d like to take their analysis a little further.

Yes marketing messages have infiltrated every nook and cranny of social media networks (whether that’s apps that friends recommend you get, groups they want you to join, or games they’d like you to play). Yes – the proliferation of acquaintances rather than real, trusted friends is part of the problem. Everyone seems to think they’re a micro-business (or some kind of eBay/e-commerce part-timer).

From my vantage point, the extended issue involves a re-introduction of traditional marketing methods on an organic medium. What do I mean by that? Here’s the simple version: People are attempting to force old methods – like multi-level marketing techniques, aggressive networking and referrals, and spammy recommendations that lead to affiliate links – onto the new social channels, and it’s not working.

Couple this phenomenon with the fact that noise levels are at all time highs, and you’ve got distrust. Social media was supposed to cut down noise after all. Your trusted group was supposed to help you filter out the noise. Yet people have been shooting themselves in the feet because they treated “friending” as a gold rush scenario.  Collecting followers does not lead to valuable information exchanges.

So what do you do to gain back that trust and make your social networks work for you?

1. Delete spammy acquaintances from your personal social media networks (use a tool like Twitter Karma, for example).

2. Participate with authenticity – send out the messages and information that you’d like to see coming back your way. This is another karma play of sorts. You get what you give – it’s that simple.

3. If you’re using Social Media Marketing (SMM) for business, start acting like an artist (ask Seth Godin about this – or read his Linchpin Book). And I don’t mean acting as in faking. I mean acting as in action. Create something remarkable, give gifts, push through to make it better, and connect people in meaningful ways.

4. Tell the truth. Stop saying your feet hurt so you can score a free pair of shoes (like the Timberland guy did on Twitter). Those days are over. That was yesterday’s creative PR move. Write honest reviews of products. And, treat your product reviews as a niche business. Huh? Yes – pick a tight little corner of the world and dedicate your reviewing resources to that (foi gras, 1-inch heels, gerbil racing, nudist party planning, the worst selling products on Amazon, beard growth tips, whatever). Who knows, some day some company might want to advertise on your site and tap your network.

5. Connect offline. Go to tweet-ups, meet your friends in person (heck, use something like Gowalla or FourSquare to make it happen), and talk about the ideas you’ve been sharing online. There is no substitute for social contact (faces are amazing things), and the serendipity of discussion often reveals precious insights because it’s not premeditated (like a Tweet or FB post). Get out there an blurt in the real world.

These tips should help you filter out a lot of noise and get you back to the genuine, productive, value-rich conversations that social media is so good at cultivating.

If you do it right you don’t have to sweat this declining trust trend.

Anyone have more tips? Please comment below.

We talk about this quite a bit in the eBay Marketing book.

Everything is moving in this direction. Google and social networking sites are getting smarter. It will be more and more difficult to game them in the future.