How to lose 3 years of customer loyalty in one campaign

Bad profits are like empty calories. They fill a need; they do it quickly. But long term they leave you much worse than before. Barry Moltz profiles Intuit's recent plan to gorge on bad profits at the expense of their long-loyal customers of QuickBooks.

The plan is simple, easy. It's like grabbing a bag of chips or cookies at the checkout line 'for dinner. They announce that some of the best features of QuickBooks right now, like being able to email invoice/invoice receipts directly to your customers, will go away....unless...UNLESS you pay for the upgrade to QuickBooks 2008.

Sweet. Sweet as in empty calories. Intuit will post a spike in revenues and maybe earnings by this forced march of their customers to a purchased upgrade. The inspiration for this idea will likely get a bonus and a round of drinks bought for them one night. Their frontline customer service will field a deluge of calls and emails from angry, long-term customers.   And then revenues will spike downward next quarter. Then growth of new accounts will drop as the only WOM from existing customers is negative. Customer evangelists become customer vigilantes. And then their profits will drop as they spend more on advertising to replace what had been free from their customer evangelists and their testimonials: new customers.

The frontline customer service staff will be directed to try and upsell every caller. That only serves to alienate the remaining customers even more. And the person who got the great big bonus, the cherry on top of the dessert, will be long gone. They'll move to another company who's hungry, and lazy, for some cheap calories. They'll brag about the success and the increase in revenues. The company's too hungry to look more than one quarter. They'll hire this person, and the cycle of bad calorie consumption will consume yet another company.

Sigh. And Intuit is often a case-study, a corporate profile, for the use of Net Promoter Score and customer evangelism and customer loyalty. 

Oh well. Life goes on. Sometimes in business it's not about building a sustainable business model. Sometimes it's about....who knows.

Another 300,000 Reasons to Blog

Funny story in the NY Times this morning. Why blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal written by Allen Salkin.

This is how it happens.

A guy starts a clever blog in January and calls it Stuff White People Like. The site contains a list of cultural totems, including gifted children, marathons and writers’ workshops, that a certain type of moneyed and liberal American might be expected to like.

Then the guy, the guy that's writing the blog, gets a book deal.

And it's a deal for $300,000 according to someone who's familiar with the terms of the deal but not authorized to disclose them... but generously shared their time in discussing with a reporter from the NY Times what they weren't authorized to discuss...Perhaps it was someone from the publisher who wasn't authorized to discuss it ON the record ... but who maybe was authorized to discuss it OFF the record so as to maximize the tittilation, aka stealth buzz factor...

Maybe. Back to the story.

One person was amazed the author was able to get such a deal when the same thing, a goof of us white people's persuasions, was made into a movie in 1985. ( It was good, not epic, like this book will be.)

Ah yes. 1985. Pre-internet. Pre-blogs, Pre-netflix, pre-youtube and social media, pre-rss and podcasts. It's all changed now. Not really. Different media, same persuasion.

Those who saw the movie will likely not buy this book and vice versa. Hence, a $300,000 book deal, maybe. ( We're not authorized to discuss this except with reporters for the NY Times...it's very hush-hush, see.)

Now if we haven't had enough fun with this...consider this thought:

The outcry over Mr. Lander’s book deal suggests the trend that has been building for a half decade may have finally reached apogee.

Not hardly. Look at Facebook. No content of its own (other than the means to monitor its members activity....), just a place for people to meet. No revenue of its own, just what its advertisers share with it. Or vice versa. And presto, bingo, a multi-billion dollar company.

Maybe this blogger's book deal, whatever the amount, is a sign that trickle-down economics really works. And if someone from FaceBook wants to trickle down a mere smattering over here, I'm ok with being a copycat blogger author. $300,000 is 300,000 reasons to keep blogging. And I'm sure every other blogger feels the same way.

The rich get richer...

and the poor die sooner.

The gap in income between the richest and poorest among us also translates into a corresponding gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest. Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh* said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she** said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

Life expectancy. You get what you pay for...or can afford.

* Gopal K. Singh:  a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services

** Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health

Best Advice from Howard Putnam

Put your people 1st and treat them as #1. They will then treat their customers as #1...

Mr. Putnam, shared this in a recent 2-part interview with Stephen Hopson at Adversity University.

Part 1.

Part 2.

5 Steps to be UNsuccessful

Here are 5 steps you can take RIGHT NOW to guarantee you'll be UNsuccessful. They're easy; they're fun. And you can start them right now in the privacy of your own home or make a splash and do 'em publicly. Following these steps in public will only serve to hasten the result you're looking for: UNsuccess. (That's quite a bit different from failure from trying.)

1) Maximize Information Overload. Saturate your mind with too much information, too many choices and go fetal with a mind paralyzed with indecision.

2) Be VERY Negative. Make sure you want only bad things, imagine them constantly, imagine them happening constantly...and presto, there they are. You get what you want. Why be careful when you can be negative?

3) Priorities? What Priorities?  You have none. You don't need 'em. Don't waste time deciding what's important. After all, you're striving for UNsuccess.

4) Procrastination. I'll write about this later.

5) Keep Your Mind Closed to New Possibilities. You're after UNsuccess. New possibilities might change that reality for you. You don't want that now do you? Of course not. Keep your mind closed at all times. Nothing's more dangerous to UN success than an open mind.

I hope this helps. Remember: stop striving. You'll only be successful.

Link from Dumb Little Man.

What can we buy with $2 trillion?

We're going to talk a little bit about priorities and opportunity cost and the impact of unsaid or untransparent conversations on an organization.

Last year, a little over 14 months ago, there was an interesting article titled What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy.

Before it answered that question, it mentioned the obvious:How do you get your head around $1 trillion. And the answer was to describe what $1.2 trillion could buy, 14 months ago it could buy:

* doubling the amount spent on cancer research (current annual budget is $6 billion; doubling it makes it $12 billion);

* treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease goes unmanaged now ($50 billion;

* universal preschool for every 3 and 4-year old in the country ($35 billion);

* all three: $97 billion (That would still leave $1.1 Trillion.)

14 months later, that same $1.2 trillion now costs $2 trillion...and rising. Here's some items we could buy with could buy with just one day's worth of this $2 trillion:

* 58,000 children in Head Start for a year;

* 11,000 additional border patrol agents;

* a year of college for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants;

* 14,000 more police officers

For a bit more we could:

* put social security on stable financial footing for the next 50 years or so.

* provide health care for all those who can't afford it AND lower our monthly premiums.

* fund a national mission to be self-sufficient for our energy demands using green technology, Like the Kennedy's Walk on the Moon program, but for our economy, our security, our environment.

If getting your head around $1 trillion was tough, imagine getting it around $2 trillion now. Maybe that's why no one wants to talk about it.  Regardless, the spending goes on and so do the opportunity costs.

It's the same in any organization. What do we get with our investment? What opportunities are lost as a result of funds not available. Whether it's discussed or not, once the money's spent, the opportunities are gone.

What would talk about in your last speech?

Interesting, inspiring meme. What would your last speech in life be about? What would you talk about?

Here's one such speech:

Links:

Chief Happiness Officer

Phoric Podcast series.