GoodBuzz Blog

Play Marketing – Advertising that Respects People

Jun
14

By

Your Success Depends on the Kindness of Strangers.

Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, leadership, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , Leave a Comment

« One of the most powerful and least understood aspects of business is how a feeling of connection between management, employees and customers provides a competitive advantage. Unless the people who are part of a business feel a sense of connection—a bond that promotes trust, cooperation and esprit de corps—they will never reach their potential as individuals, nor will the organization. » – Michael Lee Stallard

The Best manifestation of  your leadership is when Strangers love you because you’ve added value to their life. They repay you by their kindness. They become unsolicited, un-sponsored advocates for you. They are ready to go the extra mile for you. Your success is important for them, so they support you. They defend you when you are under attack, and give your their full attention and dedication when you need it. You can’t buy this kindness.

Recent studies revealed that “When people feel emotionally connected, they put more effort in their work. A 2004 Corporate Leadership Council study of 50,000 employees worldwide concluded that emotional factors were four times as important as rational factors when it came to employee effort.” Michael Lee Stallard

The reasons behind the huge impact of emotional connections on productivity are simple to understand: Most people go to work for “non-professional” reasons and for reasons far away from the reasons why you hired them. Their job might just be a mean to reach or obtain something your organization doesn’t and can’t provide.

As the movie Office Space put it:

Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.

And, most of employees don’t get much internal satisfaction from what they do at work. Their work life goes around familiar statement like “Thank God it’s Friday! Is it already Saturday night? Oh well, at least we have tomorrow. I can’t believe it is Sunday night – where did the weekend go? I sure dread going in tomorrow.” – Frugal Dad.

Work is nothing but a stepping stone

When I’ve asked people around me why they go to work I have a list like  follow:

  • earn money for my family
  • earn money to buy a house
  • earn money to start my business
  • earn money to travel the world
  • acquire experience to …….
  • to contribute to ….
  • to enjoy life
  • to save the world from ….
  • to end …..
  • to belong to ….

When you read these statements as an employer, you can easily see that Not single person mentioned your business or your annual goals. For 99% of employees, work is nothing but a stepping stone to help them get where they want to go or to have something more important from life.

You’d better help them  reach their personal goals, and by the law of reciprocity they will help you reach your goals.

From this standpoint, the role of any leader in the new economy is to get to know people individually. All it takes is to start with some basic questions you ask yourself about your people:

  • Why are they here here?
  • What do they want to achieve working for our organization (or buying this product)?
  • What are their goals in life, both personal and professional?
  • Where are they in their life’s journey ?
  • What barriers are they facing now in life?
  • And lastly, how can I, like the people leader, genuinely help them get where they want to be, be what they want to be, and contribute what they want to contribute?

The new leadership role is a role of active generosity, based on carefully and intentionally collected information about your people agenda, apart from their contextual status like customers, organization member or employee.

No leader is able to care himself about his image, his business and his project. A leader’s success depends on the people around him and how they feel about him. The new leader motto must be ‘’Care about the people and the people will care about your business, your project, and your image without you asking them to.’’

Start looking at people not from the perspective of how they can help you, but how you can help them. Master this single law and your success is assured.

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.

W A Nance

Apr
27

By

How Stupid Incentives Systems are? Part I

Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, leadership, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Wikipedia defines an incentive as “any factor (financial or non-financial) that enables or motivates a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice to the alternatives. It is an expectation that encourages people to behave in a certain way.”

Basically, marketing and advertising consist of giving some kind of incentives  and expecting people to behave in a certain way that benefits the advertiser or the marketer.

To be a successful marketer or advertiser you need to understand fully how incentives works, how people react to incentives, and what makes some incentives more powerful than others.

Never be in hurry to start an incentive program. First you need to know How Stupid incentives are. They rarely will produce the results you intend for.

Incentives systems with animals are quite basic and work well all the time, but with human beings it’s another story, it could be very very complicated, even catastrophic. With humans, incentives systems mostly produce unintended results. We’ve collected the following examples to illustrate how humans creativity goes with incentives systems to produce very funny results:

  1. In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead it led to the farming of rats.
  2. 19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
  3. In the 1990s, when Sears instituted a production quota for its auto repair staff, mechanics began performing unnecessary and costly maintenance.
  4. In the medical profession, physicians feel forced to exaggerate symptoms of managed-care patients, since otherwise their insurers would deny coverage.
  5. People who are financially rewarded for donating blood actually donate less blood than those donating blood for Free.
  6. Measuring productivity of computer programmers by the amount of code written may reward inefficient programming practices. Programmers write more lines of code to please the boss and reap rewards, but the softwares are buggy and insecure.
  7. Paying the executives of corporations proportionately to the size of their corporation is intended to encourage them to grow their companies. However, it may cause them to pursue mergers to enlarge their companies, to the detriment of their shareholders’ interest.
  8. Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls made is intended to reward the fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, which reduce the number of fires.
  9. In Chile, most professional workers are still required to work a fixed amount of hours each week instead of being asked to meet productivity expectations. This has lead to an increase on in-office leisure time, colloquially termed “sacar la vuelta”.
  10. Paying architects and engineers according to what is spent on a project leads to excessively costly projects.
  11. Where libraries, universities, and similar institutions charge a higher fee for copying than for printing, users may print multiple copies of a document, which could cost the institution more than free copying would.
  12. Pressed to bill as much time as possible, ambitious young lawyers often overcharge clients. Overbilling, often to the extent of criminality, is highly common within the legal profession.

All these examples only prove one thing, you need to be careful about incentives, gifts and rewards systems, because 97% of incentives programs fail. Most loyalty program too are failed or had short lived results, then have become a cost center for companies. They no longer have the power to differentiate your business, as they don’t bring a lot of value to customers.

The situation is not desperate however. There are incentives systems that work consistently, that are not short lived or cost you lot of money, and always result to the behaviors the sponsors are looking for. We will talk about these incentives systems in Part II.