Ths post 3 Ways to Avoid Being Laughed At appeared first on Simple Strategies.
Yes, we laugh at people. And at brands and companies and political parties. Childish as it might seem, we all enjoy the fine art of ridicule.
Try this. Search for any company or brand on Twitter. You’ll see lots of ridicule. Or Google any band followed by “sucks.” On the links that return, you’ll find a blend of humor, ridicule, scorn, and anger to rival a school board meeting in a bankrupt town.
The sad thing is that most of these companies bring it on themselves. Sure, a lot of the anti-brand internet chatter comes from juvenile malcontents who just want to hate and mock. But it sinks into the consumer psyche because of the brand’s selfish presence.
To help out erstwhile brands that just don’t get it, here are three free tips:
1. Don’t tell me your mission statement. I don’t care what your mission it; I care what my mission is. Instead of telling me why you’re in business, try asking me why I navigated to your web site. Instead of sharing your vision with me, the customer, try telling your Customer Service Rep that you envision a world where your customers feel like loved family members. Since few if any companies even try to live up to their phony mission and vision statements, hide them from sarcastic bloggers.
2. Don’t tell me all about your CEO. I’ll never meet her, and don’t care how long she’s been with your company or that she cut her teeth in GE’s research lab. Why don’t you introduce me, instead, to the people in your company who care even less about your mission statement than I do: the people who can help me accomplish my mission? Introduce the person I’ll talk to if I click the Get Live Help Now button. That’s who can help me, not your CEO. If you make it easy for me to get what I want, maybe I’ll even introduce the CSR to your mission statement for you. (Trust me: she’s never read it.)
3. Don’t make me follow your designed path through your website. I don’t care what you want me to see, and it won’t make me buy more. It will make me return to my search results and click on your competitor’s link. I don’t care about your latest press release or Walt Mossberg’s review of your new software tool–unless I’m looking for that software tool. But you don’t know that’s what I’m looking for, because you stuck your mission statement on the landing page where my mission statement should go.
There’s a lot of other things about your company that we mortals giggle about. These three are big, though, because they tell us that you care more about the products from your annual executive off-sites than you do about us and our needs. When something goes wrong–as something surely will–you’ve garnered no good will from us, your customers. If we think, though, that you’re humble and trying to please us, then we’ll be a little more forgiving.
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