Category: Marketing

Suns CEO pays tribute to a sports marketing mastermind

It’s hard to believe that the NBA could ever have been described as a marginalized sport, but that’s exactly how Rick Welts, president and chief operating officer of the Phoenix Suns, describes the league during its early days. In his address before the Sport Marketing Association recently at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Welts paid tribute to Bill Veeck, one of the early the marketing masterminds in baseball. Veeck was an inspiration for the new face and profitable stamp on professional basketball and the arenas where the games are played. Owner of the Chicago White Sox, St. Louis Browns and Cleveland Indians, Veeck stunned the sport with his stunts and promotions designed to get fans into stadium seats, and just as important, to enjoy the game.

Out of Chapter 11, into friendlier skies: A sleeker united upgrades customer service

The United Airlines scheduled to emerge from bankruptcy court early next year is a battle-scarred, stripped-down survivor, operationally superior to the company that nosedived into Chapter 11 three years ago. United’s fleet is streamlined, now flying just five types of planes, the work force whittled, union contracts renegotiated and the legacy pension plan terminated. The process was excruciating, according to Larry De Shon, United’s senior vice president of airport operations. “It got ugly. But I had to focus and stay focused. Now, after three years in bankruptcy court, United is fundamentally stronger.”

The transformation of IBM: Rebooting from the ground up

Service technicians once were at the helm of IBM’s support process; one group handled a client’s hardware service while another fixed software bugs. Those were the dark days of the ’90s, when IBM itself was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the warranty and service departments were part of the train wreck. Today, service is a smoothly integrated part of the product life cycle, literally built in during manufacturing, automated to the point of “self-healing” and finessed by highly trained techs. It’s an example of how service innovation can help transform an organization, according to a spokesman for today’s streamlined IBM Global Services.

Big changes may mean big turnover amid service transition

Expect to lose a big chunk of your staff once you dive into the cultural-change process, warn executives of companies that have made the leap successfully. For example, during United Airlines’ reorganization and overhaul of airport services, many supervisors accustomed to the old ways of doing business were unsettled. Some initially fought the changes, eventually deciding to come onboard. Others, unable to make the leap, quit. Services-savvy PetSmart opened its own dog grooming school when it decided to provide the service in its stores but lacked the skilled manpower. IBM Global Services lost customer service reps who were unwilling or unable to cross-train in hardware/software. The cultural transition can be a rough and painful journey, the experts agree — but in the end it’s worth it.

Customer rage: It’s not always about the money

Seventy percent of American consumers report having a bad customer-service experience that left them “upset” or “extremely upset” in the last 12 months, according to a new national survey. And that should ring alarm bells for service providers across the nation, because it’s estimated that the angriest consumers negatively influence about 18 others. Contrary to most companies’ assumptions, it’s not a refund that most customers are after. “Most people want simple or non-monetary remedies to resolve their problems and complaints, which overturns one of the universal truths companies use to guide their policy-making,” notes one researcher.

Bloggers beware: Corporate image can soar or plummet in blogosphere

In a recent survey, 43 percent of marketing executives cited "customer influence by word-of-mouth" advertising as a technique they planned to use in the next six months. Blogs are likely to be tapped in that effort, since 22 percent of those surveyed indicated plans to showcase their company and offerings in the blogosphere. But this medium is not without risks, and even big kids in the marketing sandbox can make detrimental blog blunders. "If you think about ways people can learn about a product, almost all are marketer-controlled," according to James Ward, a marketing professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business. Ward cautions that the "private talk" found in blogs is perceived to be credible, and "when that trust is undermined [by marketing ploys], consumers feel a sense of moral outage."