Virginia Miracle

British Airways is taking a new, transparent, clutter free approach to launching their new subsidiary airline Open Skies. On the company website – consisting primarily of a blog and contact information – the request for collaborative product development seems quite sincere:

“We don’t want you to simply witness the creation of an airline, we want you to be part of it. That may sound like puffery, but it isn’t. We hope to prove that your contributions will help make OpenSkies a unique and, invariably, a better travelling experience.”

They are certainly off to a good start. Open Skies flights, starting this summer between New York London and Brussels will have only 82 passengers and feature seats that really recline. The 28 most expensive seats will recline completely flat into 6′ beds.

This type of collaborative product development is the type of thing Jackie Huba suggests in her amusing/disgusting “Meatball Sundae” video in her preventative measures of not having to market a “meatball” in the first place.

Open Skies is an exciting experiment. I hope that Open Skies will close the loop and let us know what elements of their customer experience are user designed. I wonder if they’ll filter input coming from real potential users of this limited service vs. suggestions coming from folks like me who are mainly curious about it as a case study. With only 6 months to go until their anticipated first flight, we won’t have to wait long to see.

Today, pastor Ben over at the Church of the Customer shared the weigh-in of his unwanted direct mail for the holiday season: a whopping 21.5 pounds. That’s for one household. Let’s pretend we’re being interviewed by a management consulting firm and do some “back of the envelope” estimation.

There are around 100 million households in the US, but based on household income, let’s assume 40 million of those wouldn’t be considered attractive enough to be targeted with this type of weighty marketing (the heavier the paper, the more it costs to mail, etc. A lot of high end modeling goes into whether you receive a catalog, how frequently you get mailed, and how many pages get mailed to different types of households). So that’s 60M mailed addresses.

Let’s also be conservative and assume that the Church is on the particularly high end of the spectrum and discount the weight they received by 25% to get a number that we feel more comfortable extrapolating over the rest of the population, so that would be a household poundage of 16.125 lbs.

Based on these above numbers our (conservative) estimate of the holiday direct mail that cluttered homes is just under 1 billion pounds (967,500,000) or 483750 tons.

I’ll also use a low-ball estimate of number of trees per ton of paper (7.68 trees) to offset the fact that while folks like Neiman’s are using close to 15 trees per ton of their catalogs, some marketers (including Dell, Patagonia, and Williams Sonoma) are using more and more recycled paper. This brings us to a grand total of 3,715,200 trees.

I have no idea how to estimate the brainpower used to create the catalogs, the gas burned to bring these gems to my mailbox, and the gas burned to take them from my recycling bin to a recycle center, I’m guessing that it would be enough to make starting a conversation with your customers not look quite so expensive after all.

(If you want to stop receiving unwanted catalogs, visit Catalog Choice. If you’d like to plant some trees to offset the onslaught, visit Plantit2020. If you’d like to know more about opening a dialogue with your customers, visit WOMMA.)

There was a great case study shared by Jeffery Eisenberg yesterday in his post “Should You Cancel All Your Advertising?”. In 2003, Jeff Bezos pulled all of Amazon’s advertising and chose to reinvest those dollars in deferring shipping charges for customers. This shows insight into the top potential objection to shopping online and directly combats it – if I can get the same item for less on Amazon AND not pay shipping, the only remaining reason to shop retail would be if I absolutely had to have something today. By giving shipping back to the customer, Amazon used great customer experience to generate great word of mouth. But, this does not come without a pricetag. In a recent presentation from Amazon’s CFO, forgone shipping revenue was estimated at a whopping $600Million for a single year.

To answer the question Eisenberg poses of whether or not other businesses should cancel their advertising to focus on word of mouth marketing alone, there are a few considerations:

1) Current Customer Experience – Why are people opting for your competition (be it another business or another channel) instead of you? Is that something you could correct by reinvesting marketing dollars?

2) Quality of Customer Stories – When folks do select your business, what kind of conversational capital are you providing them? Is it the kind of story they will want to shout from the mountaintop, tell a select few, or never think about mentioning again.

3) Awareness & Urgency – Does anyone know who you are? If the answer is no, it could take a long time to launch your business with absolutely no advertising. You would be relying on your immediate personal and business connections to get the word out.

If you do have a solid customer base who would be willing to tell your story more often if only you provided them with a better one, the reinvestment of marketing dollars into your customer experience might payoff just as much as Amazon’s did.

In my post last week about high end brands such as Kimpton Hotels rewarding customers with unique experiences instead of things, I mentioned my personal choice to give my father a night at Kimpton’s Hotel Monaco property in DC for his birthday. Last night, I called him in his room and heard a new man. He was borderline giddy about how much fun they were having and, let me assure you, my parents are deep and wonderful, but not the giddy type.  His quote was “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything to deserve being treated so well!”

With my credit card authorization fax to the hotel, I submitted a note explaining that it was my Dad’s birthday, that I am a Kimpton enthusiast, and that I wanted my parents to understand why I am so passionate about their brand. They were clearly up to the challenge. My father informed me that they upgraded my parents to a 2-room corner King suite, had champagne for them at check in, delivered wine to the room, and generally treated them like VIPs at every turn despite the fact that they had never before spent a night at a Kimpton property. Now, the business side of me understands that that suite would have gone unoccupied anyway (all hotel rates were cut this week in DC because everyone’s in Iowa!) and that it didn’t necessarily cost them extra to do what they did. That being said, I know most hotels would not have taken the time or effort to create this personalized experience.

The actions of the staff of this hotel gives me another great story to tell about why I love Kimpton, and gave my parents not just a great experience, but a story I know they will tell over and over again. To please my parents is the greatest gift that this brand could give me, and I am deeply , deeply appreciative.

Maybe it’s because I work. Maybe it’s because I am new to the Mom game. Maybe it’s because I don’t DVR Ellen. Whatever the reason, I missed “In the MotherHood” when it debuted last Mother’s Day. MotherHood is a series of 5 webisodes. The situations are submitted by and voted on by real life moms responding to assignments such as sharing their child’s most public meltdown or most embarrassing potty training story. Professional screen writers turn the winning plots into truly funny scripts that are then acted by Leah Remini and Chelsea Handler and directed by Peter Lauer (who automatically has my respect because he has 3 director turns on Arrested Development on his long resume).

The site is “co-conceived” by Suave & Sprint and hosted by Microsoft. I’m not sure what those 3 brands have to do with each other, but the numbers, submissions, and end creative product seem to indicate success in creating a hub for mothers to share stories. The series was promoted and aired on the “Ellen” show which drove online viewership. On a quick peruse of the forums, I saw that many of the threads are still active months after the voting and content closed. I look forward to checking back to see what choices the brands will make to continue the engagement now that they have assembled such a large audience. Maybe the goal is just to host the conversation, advertise on the margin, and benefit from the brand glow.

By the way, the reason I found out about this expos facto was on an “encore” presentation of Leah Remini’s guest appearance on Chelsea Lately. Now that, I DVR.