EDITOR's FOCUS: Snowball

We recently hosted a meeting in Chicago where Dr. Paul Wang, Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Illinois’ Northwestern University spoke about marketing. He opened his talk with a video clip from the romantic comedy Roxanne, starring Steve Martin. In the movie, firemen respond to an alarm which turns out to be a cat in a tree – “Snowball.” While a huge crowd has gathered around the firemen who are positioning ladders for the rescue, Martin, who is their supervisor, calmly walks onto the scene, looks up the tree, opens a can of cat food, and calls a very willing Snowball down the tree. Rescue completed.

The message, Wang said, is that it’s easy to get caught up in what you are  doing and lose sight of the customer and what he or she wants. In fact, Wang, who has consulted for major corporations, says that while most companies think they are doing a great job in serving their customers, the harsh reality is that often customers are simply tolerating the way the service is provided.

The solution is to see what you do from your customers’ point of view – from Snowball’s perspective. Wang says the way to do this is to ask the customer questions. That’s not easy, he notes, because customers will not open up to you and will also lie. The solution is to come up with 20 good customer questions to get closer to the truth about what they really want,  like and dislike. Wang doesn’t offer a list of ready-to-use questions, but instead advises asking questions to discover which ones help you uncover what customers think and what they want.

One challenge is to fight assumptions about the standard way that lawn and landscape services are provided and focus more on the ideal. This means ignoring the price tag. As suggestions, Wang said it could be giving the customer a unique brand experience, more choices to let them feel they are in charge, simplifying the service experience, or even the service “packaging.”

Another mistake is believing that if your service makes good sense logically, customers will then make the obvious decision and buy your service. Customers often do not make buying decisions based on reason, Wang says.

Smart marketing is more a matter of doing the basics well, he adds, than  in trying to find some secret formula or shortcut to get your customers to buy your services.

“Find out what you do best and what is most valuable to the customer and then give that to them,” Wang says. “Good marketing begins by finding out who you really are and not pretending to be what you are not.”

The time-proven formula for business success is to find out what customers really want by listening to them closely, and then delivering against it consistently to gain a positive reputation and referrals.

“All advertisements make promises,” he says. “I recommend looking at all your advertising promises to make sure you are delivering against them.”