Category: Marketing

Podcast: Persuading nervous customers to buy

With the economy continuing to falter, consumer product and service companies are looking for every edge to bring in business. Robert Cialdini, a professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School and author of "Yes: 50 Scientifically-Proven Ways to be Persuasive," talks about the psychological tendencies that determine whether you or your company can persuade a customer to buy your product. In uncertain times, people want to know what the experts say, and what other people like them are doing.

Geek Squad: Best Buy’s corporate mythology

We all know the Best Buy brand — the big-box stores have been around for 30 years, populated by employees wearing blue shirts, selling products emblazoned with the yellow tag. Around 10 years ago, services began taking center stage — derailing some industry leaders and empowering others. It was time to do something different. Best Buy leaders "started looking at how to get closer to our customers," said Sean Skelley, senior vice president of services for Best Buy Co., Inc. They came up with the concept of "relatable mythology," a story that connects the business to its customers. Skelley was speaking to customer-service leaders attending the Compete Through Service Symposium, an annual event hosted by the Center for Services Leadership at the W.P. Carey School of Business.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Customer focus key to record sales during retail slump

Wearing faded gray jeans, a gray striped shirt and black sneakers, Tony Hsieh hardly looks the part of a $1 billion company’s CEO. But as Hsieh addressed a session of the 19th Annual Compete Through Service Symposium sponsored by the W. P. Carey School of Business, those in suits and leather shoes took notice of the witty but reserved 34-year-old with an uncanny business sense who a decade ago built a $265 million Internet advertising company and then sold it to Microsoft. Hsieh now is head of Zappos, an online company founded in 1999 to sell shoes, which has since expanded into clothing, housewares, cookware and even electronics. But more than merchandise, Zappos is selling customer service and corporate culture.

Dave Lewis: Creating the creativity economy

In Canada, a group of Nike employees meets once a week in the same place at the same time for a creative brainstorming session. But there’s an element that keeps the sessions from going stale. The meetings are on a Toronto subway car. "Gray Formica meeting spaces lead to Gray Formica thinking," Dave Lewis told an audience at the Center for Services Leadership at Arizona State University’s 19th Annual "Compete Through Service" symposium. The mission of Lewis’ company, ?What if! The Innovation Company, is to shake folks out of stale thinking. But Lewis knows that there isn’t necessarily a fast train that takes companies to a more innovative and creative place. Creativity that leads to innovation, Lewis said, tends to be more a habit than a destination.

Podcast: Framing the issue did ‘bailout’ label skew debate?

Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke learned a lesson from Media Relations 101 the hard way when they introduced a plan of action to stem the financial crises and did not suggest a catchy name for it. Left without a headline phrase, the media came up with its own: "Bailout." The negative connotations associated with "bailout" contributed to its initial defeat in the House of Representatives. Management professor Gerry Keim, who studies the relationship between business and government, uses the episode to talk about the importance of choosing words carefully when framing an issue.

Authors answer the age-old question: ‘What was I thinking?’

Brothers Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman followed different paths in life, but they decided to collaborate on a book when they realized that Ori, with his MBA, and Rom, with a Ph.D. in psychology, kept running into the same dynamic puzzle through their work: What makes smart people make irrational decisions? In "Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior," the brothers Brafman attempt to explore several of the psychological forces that derail rational thinking. Some of the questions they address include: How do these forces creep up on us? When are we most vulnerable to them? How do they affect our careers, businesses, personal relationships? When do they put our finances, or even our lives, at risk? And why don’t we realize when we’re getting swayed?