Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Alex Frankel, a business journalist and a keen observer of the hidden cultural norms that drive corporate America, has a new book out.  Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee chronicles his two years undercover as a barista at Starbucks, a UPS driver, and at the retail counters of Gap, Apple, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. It's a great premise.  Who doesn't want to get the insider perspective on some of the most admired consumer brands?  Alex focuses as much attention on how these companies recruit and train to enforce certain cultural values as he does to the experience of the job itself.  For advertisers who are looking to turn their customers into brand ambassadors, it's worth thinking about how these companies systematically go about turning hourly workers into successful messangers of the brand.

I met Alex during his stint as an Organic copywriter (future research?), and I had a chance to ask him some questions about the book.

Can you talk a little about the genesis of the project? And why a front-line worker and not, say, an entry-level employee?

When I was about 17 I met a guy who had worked as a UPS driver and he told me all about that job. He told me specifically about how much he had been analyzed and examined by some scientists sent from corporate headquarters: They had measured things like how long it took him to walk an average package to someone’s front door from his truck. The level to which they cared about such things intrigued me and from then on I knew I had to work for UPS some day, and to live the brand. My goal was to work entry-level jobs on the front-lines of customer service so I could stand in as the face of a given company.

For an ad agency like Organic, it seems like a fantasy to spend time with a brand the way you did - to really live and breathe it (although Agency.com was ridiculed precisely for this when they did their Subway pitch). How did being a front-line employee get you inside the brand?

When you are a front-line employee you represent a brand, a company, to the outside world. You are a channel through which a company can showcase what it stands for and represents. By working on the front-lines, as I did, I was able to bring in my understanding of branding and corporate culture and then see how companies trained me and indoctrinated me into their cultures; I could see how they were making me into one of them (or not).

What were some of the more intriguing differences between the consumer’s perceptions of the brand and what you actually encountered?

I went in with a feeling that all the frontline jobs I was applying to were jobs that essentially drew from the same talent pool, but I was completely wrong. Someone who elects to work at Starbucks is a very different person from someone who gets hired and stays on for ten years at UPS. There’s a self-selection process in play that I had not understood and that surprised me greatly. As a customer, by and large you don’t really know how a company uses its employees and what their true roles are. In each place I worked I found examples of this intriguing: Gap workers are given many incentives to sign up customers for GapCards; when Starbucks launches a new drink it tries to convince patrons to buy them; UPS drivers must work their way up from loading trucks to driving them.

The unprecedented hype and buzz surrounding the impending iPhone launch continues ... MSN is hosting a roundtable of authentic iPhone reviews from the following "anointed" journalists:

Newsweek's Steven Levy, the New York Times' David Pogue, Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today's Ed Baig.

Read their collective reviews here.

For a contrarian point-of-view, watch the Ries Report where Al Ries "proves" that the iPhone (a convergence technology) will ultimately fail - He compares the current hype for the iPhone to that of the Ford Edsel in the last century, a product that never lived up to the hype. His thesis is that successful products are divergent by nature (iPod, for example), not convergent. 

As a born contrarian, my head says Al Ries is correct. However, my heart WANTS an iPhone!

Thanks to Laura McGowan for the link.

David Feldt 

Want to know what the world will be like five short years from now?

New Yorker Magazine recently held their inaugural New Yorker Conference, “2012: Stories From the Near Future,” which took place last week.

Watch the views of luminaries like Malcolm Gladwell, Barry Diller, Arianna Huffington, Will Wright, and Craig Newmark.

Topics covered include:

• Genius
• Intellectual Property
• Power shifts in society (future of the organization)
• Morality
• Gaming
• Architecture
• Surrendipity
• Solutions
• Design
• Mobile Technology
• The Web

David Feldt

I wrote earlier about the M-Squared event at the Presidio of San Francisco, a great half-day conference on the future of marketing. I had the opportunity to follow-up with Chip Conley, Founder and CEO of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain and one of the most interesting speakers of the day.

You spoke about building each of your hotel concepts around a particular psychographic.  Do you think of guests as having a fixed personality, or have you found that guests want to try on different moods at different times?

People have different moods, and more than ever, people are likely to shift.  It’s harder to predict what a customer will want at any given time.  When you bring your Blackberry on a personal trip, are you in a work or a play mindset?  People are trading up and trading down. The purpose of their trip is what’s key here.

There are plenty of famous consumer product brands that mirror their customers' aspirations: Williams-Sonoma, Harley-Davidson, Red Bull to name a few.  Are there are other services companies that you feel are successful at what you've called "identity refreshment"?

Is Whole Foods a product or a service company?  They’re an aspirational brand. Their customers are shopping for a product, but they’re also looking for a certain level of service.  It’s the same with Netflix. It’s a product, but you are definitely getting a service with their mass customization.  In our sector, W Hotels and Ian Schrager are service companies and competitors who also help create identity.  Geek Squad has a unique identity and is probably an aspirational brand as well. They are saying “tech can be fun”.

Can a service experience be budget and/or ubiquitous (think Waffle House, if you know the Southeast chain, or Dunkin' Donuts if you're from the Northeast) and still meet unconscious needs? Or does a top-of-Maslow's hierarchy experience necessarily need to be high end?

In-N-Out Burger is a good example.  There’s something aspirational about their All-American brand.  It’s slightly hip. The beauty of the brand is that they have people coming from both directions on the economic spectrum.  "Joe Lunchbox" is trading up from McDonald's, the professor is trading down from a more formal dining experience.  Target is also simultaneously about trading up and trading down.  Southwest Airlines is definitely a trading down brand. But it’s definitely a service experience.  Both Geek Squad and Southwest are doing something very interesting.  They’re taking something very serious – air transportation, or your PC – and saying, “hey, you can have a sense of humor about this, and we can have a personality”.  They’re creating an emotional connection with the customer.

The reality is, if you’re a mass brand but you have a personality, you can still capture people on a budget who don’t care about that aspect of your brand.  I started Joie de Vivre [by renovating the Phoenix Hotel] when I was 25.  I wanted to create hotels I could afford to stay in! 75% of our product line is in the 2-3 star range. That means we are competing with Holiday Inn, with Radisson.  Our personality is what differentiates us.