The email arrived in my inbox in the evening at around 6pm. With over 60% of emails being read between 6pm and 12noon, they are certainly increasing their chances of getting it read.
But of course this is all going to vary depending on your business model and your audience. These stats are always a nice pointer but as in the words of Oscar Wilde
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”
Don't be like everyone else..everyone else isn't you!
As the offer runs for the next 3 Mondays, it will be interesting to see if they follow up over the next couple of weeks
Excuse the blatant abuse of The Ting Tings' song title, but it did ring a bell when I received an email from Starbucks this morning.
From Wednesday 14th March, Starbucks Cafes will use your name in store as a way of making the experience much more personal.
The actual transcript is as follows
Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays?
We've all become user names, reference numbers and IP addresses.
That's why at Starbucks we've decided to do things differently.
From now on we won't refer to you as a latte, or a mocha, but instead as your folks intended, by your name.
Okay, we know it's only a little thing but hey, why don't we buy you a coffee on the morning of the 14th of March, and you can introduce yourself.
We're Starbucks. Nice to meet you.
It is only a little thing but it does go back to the old days of customer service when the local shop keeper knew his customers by name and not by an id or loyalty card number. And of course knowing someone's name is a great asset when starting up a conversation
Admittedly Starbucks don't make my favourite espresso, but in terms of of how they are getting to grips with today's consumer ( iPhone payments, intelligent use of data with their Starbucks Rewards card and Crowdourcing through My Starbucks Idea ) they certainly get top marks for effort.
I for one will be in store 14th March for my free Tall Latte.
Let's hope there aren't too many Gianfrancos in the queue!
For those of you who don't know John, he is a great exponent of the importance of Stories and Storytelling for both Leaders and Brands.
At the recent event, he highlighted how the Hero of the Story is often the key difference between a Brand Story that is successful and one that is not. He cited the Facebook pages of Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. The former having fewer fans than Starbucks but more highly engaged ones.
And the main difference was Hero of the stories being told. In Starbucks' case it was the brand, while with Dunkin Donuts it was the Customer. This makes sense doesn't it? I am more likely to share a story that has me at the centre of it than a Brand.
So this brings me to Twitter. Now you might say that a story can't be told in 140 characters or less. True But what Twitter have done very cleverly by launching Twitter Stories, is to talk about the Stories behind the Tweets.
Here's how Aaron Durandsaved his mom's bookstore with a Tweet.
Aaron Durand’s mother was in trouble. She had run an independent bookstore for nearly two decades when an economic downturn hit that threatened to close the shop. Aaron wanted to help his mom, but wasn’t sure what he could do. He wrote about his mom’s plight on his blog then tweeted it out, adding at the last second an offer to buy a burrito for anyone who bought $50 worth of books during the holidays at his mom’s shop.
The story took hold. The Tweet was passed along from person to person across Portland’s art and design community. It was retweeted and retweeted until hundreds of people had read the story.
Overnight, new customers started to arrive and business began to pick up. The story continued to snowball on Twitter. The bookstore went on to have its best holiday season ever, and has continued to thrive each season since.
Twitter is not the story. Brands are not the story. People are the story
That was the title of the very interesting after dinner speech at the Digital Leadership Dinner given by The Marketing Society on Tuesday evening.
Read a summary here and listen to a snapshot from speaker John Grant, author and co-founder of Ecoinomyhere
My own view from a marketing perspective, is that even with many marketing models where we believe that we are moving towards true democracy we are still just painting Benign Dictatorship in a different colour.The recent example of Subway for example allowing customers to choose between a variety of new sandwiches for the new product launch is limited democracy. They were given a choice from a selection from Subway.
If we are looking to see how widespread democracy through crowd sourcing is, the take a look at over 1000 crowdsorcing and crowdfunding sites listed here .
Of course it depends on how we define democracy. If we believe that all brands should be run by consumers, then quite frankly I'm not sure there is a future in that. But if we believe that democratic barnds are ones that allow consumers a say in new product development including suggesting new products and services ( eg Starbucks) , or allow consumes to openly cast a vote on how good a product or service is ( eg Amazon ) then I'm a believer!
You have two similar restaurants to choose from on an unfamiliar high street. One is empty and one is crowded. Which do you choose?
About half of Europe has a Facebook account – when the other half look for a Social Platform, where will they look first?
Metcalfe’s law is that the value of a network is the number of users squared (n2).
Gianfranco’s Law of Crowds – Attraction of a network is based on .
(The Number of Users × The Number of Users you know × The Number of Sites it gives you access to
(The Number of Ways it Offers Brands the Opportunity to Gain Access to you)2
Conversely a Brand can learn a lot from the Crowd ( look at how Starbucks use the crowd for product development through ),but remember that sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.
