Reliable Systems

Last Christmas holiday I took off more time than normal and had a great opportunity to spend time with my brothers and sisters and their families. One of the exciting aspects of having your siblings marry is they bring in to the family people with a very different perspective than you grew up with.  Now, my immediate family is entirely Windows (although go back 10 years and they were mostly Apple, interestingly). My sister and her fiancé (who both live and work in academia) are strong Apple proponents. They have Apple laptops that talk to their Apple wireless router and their iPods and iPhones, etc.

At one point, my sister’s fiancé noticed that my new laptop was running Vista and missed no opportunity to comment on all of the problems with Vista.  Eventually I took the bait and asked how he was handling all of the problems with OS X 10.5. His reaction was that there weren’t any.  When I asked for more specifics, pulling up some reference articles from the net, he downplayed the problems. Along the way he said “well, they did break X Windows. If I’m using many X programs, I have to reboot perhaps a few times a day, but I can handle that.” I think there are few phrases that typify better how we develop an emotional attraction to brands and products that goes well beyond our reasoning.

It’s OK to Be Emotional

Everyone I’ve met has a soft spot for at least a few products and brands. These things hold a special place where we actively want them to succeed and be awesome. Some companies and products, for whatever reason manage to cultivate this feeling in more people: Probably the gold standard is Apple and perhaps Starbucks. When you relate to a brand this way, you tend to give it the benefit of the doubt and even defend it from anything that might be seen as detracting from it. You will tend to keep this relationship with a brand even if you aren’t a current customer, because this is an emotional attachment, not a rationale evaluation.

For myself, some of the brands I relate to in this way are (in no particular order):  Ford, Volvo, Microsoft, Dell, John Deere, Yamaha (Audio equipment)…  There are also brands that I have the opposite reaction to: I tend to be highly suspicious of their products from the start: Apple, IBM, Oracle, Honda, Toyota… This emotional tie-in with brands is a well known phenomenon that is heavily exploited by product marketing and ultimately is what creates value in a brand itself.

One aspect of how you react to products and brands that you love is that you tend to not want to brook any criticism of the brand or products and have an emotional first reaction before you’ll listen to rationale concerns.  Think about your favorite computer or car brand:  If you hear someone else say something negative about that brand (”Those Honda cars, they’re just underpowered and can’t get moving.”) how do you react?  It’s the intensity of that reaction that lets you know how you relate to that brand.

Conversely, most people have purchased a product against your brand preference. It may be because what you want is out of stock and you can’t wait, or because there is one killer feature you just can’t live without, or some other consideration that manages to overpower your brand loyalty.  When you do, have you had the experience that you are quick to criticize even the smallest detail of the product? It’s natural – you want to reinforce with reasoning your original opinion that was created out of emotion. You’re even more likely to post a blog article or seek out another way to get your critique to the vendor than you would be if it was your preferred brand.

Help the Brands You Love

If you really care about a brand, you should do your best to provide the strongest, most critical feedback for it. In fact, when reviewing survey results or customer feedback within a company it’s the negative feedback that has value. When working within a company, I’m not particularly interested in people that give marks above 80%; that feedback isn’t giving me anything I can work on. What’s interesting is the low marks. What’s really useful are low marks with explanation so I can understand where the person was coming from.

If you want to help the brands you love, look for each opportunity to not give them the benefit of the doubt but instead practice tough love – provide specific, reasoned feedback on what the product needs to do better. Find ways to get it to the people within that brand that can make a difference. In my experience, the folks inside those companies hunger for it, and it has an impact much greater than you expect because these companies are made of people, and their decisions are colored by what evidence they can find to back up what’s being spoken.

Are You Really Extremely Satisfied?

The next time you get a form that asks you to rate your experience from say 1-5 or 1-10, be really honest. While you know that they are looking for everything to be in the top bracket, can you really say that you had an exception or extraordinary experience in every category? While that may do well for some internal marketing statistics report, it isn’t really useful to the product engineers behind the product.

When I bought my last car, I was really honest: I had high expectations of the dealership, and they met them – that meant when it asked did we meet or exceed your expectations, they.. met them. I got a call from a regional marketing rep later wanting to know why I had given them low marks. Two things happened from this: I was able to explain to them that I had high expectations and why (the dealership had done very well in the past for me) and personally comment on a few problem areas that really weren’t the dealership’s fault (they didn’t have access to some information to help me that they should have). This helped the brand in a way I’m sure me just checking the 10 box wouldn’t have.