The Customer View

Jet Blue: A Little Lovin' Goes a Long Way

It's a well-known postulate in the world of customer service, that a customer who has had a negative experience quickly and sufficiently remedied by the offending business tends to be even more loyal to that business than the customer who has never, ever had a negative experience with them.  When I first heard that, I laughed, "Yeah, so if someone smacks me in the face, then says he's sorry - I'm gonna like him better than somebody else who never smacked me?  Yeah, right."

Leave it to me to reduce business concepts to smacking.

But in business, it makes sense - the loyalty thing, not the smacking.  Customers' great fear is that they get "taken" - that they provide their hard-earned cash, and in exchange they get less than dollar value in return.  This is one of the reasons customers fly into rages so quickly when something goes wrong in their interaction.  They sense they are going to get reamed, and they are not happy about that.

But, if they have had a problem already successfully resolved by a business, the customer then has his fears alleviated a bit by the business' past performance.  There is a comfort level, and a confidence that, regardless of what might happen, things will be resolved amicably.  There is trust.

Whereas, if a customer has only seen a business perform when all is well, he/she has no idea how they may react under pressure.  And all it takes is one bad situation to turn away a customer for life.

So this brings me back to the Jet Blue St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where an otherwise customer-focused business just sort of melted down, and 1000 flights had to be canceled, including several that had customers effectively imprisoned on the tarmac for 8-10 hours.  Surely, this was a back-breaking situation for the airline, which had spent considerable time and energy building up a strong reputation for customer care.

But looky here!  It seems as though the efforts Jet Blue had put into customer focus before this fiasco, as well as their swift attempts to remedy the ill-will created by it, have paid off.  A recent survey of travelers conducted by Compete, Inc. showed that 14% are actually more inclined to fly Jet Blue since the Valentine's Day melt-down and subsequent recovery and re-commitment to service that the company and its CEO have pledged.  This is in addition to the 56% of travelers whose belief in Jet Blue never wavered in the wake of this service nightmare.

When a service horror story that gains global notoriety hits your business, yet 70% of your market still believes in you, THAT shows you the true value of  customer focus.

  -- Chuck Dennis

The Name Game

Selecting a good name is one of those things that many people think is an easy thing. Whether the name is for a product, or a company, or a service or a building, there's more to the process than meets the eye.  The problem is that too often naming exercises are done without consideration for the world that surrounds the name.  Is it being used anywhere else?  Are there permutations of the name that could be confusingly similar?  And what about ownership?  Aside from registered trademark rights - who else might "own" the name? 

Let's take a trip down Route 9 in Natick, Massachsetts.  There is a shopping mall that has been there for 40 years, engagingly named "The Natick Mall."  My first after-school job was in a restaurant there, back in the dark ages.  The mall has recently undergone a major expansion:  500,000 square feet of new stores, restaurants.  With a new and improved mall, it makes sense to embark on some new marketing and positioning.  All of that begs for a new name. Something that denotes the new status of the mall, creates some new buzz, describes what the mall is today.  Right?

The marketers of the mall labored over a new potential name.  End result:  the owners of the mall, General Growth Properties, selected "Natick" for the new name.  Of all the potential names that were generated, they decided to appropriate the town of Natick's name.  Besides displaying a singular lack of originality, thinking that it would be a good idea to use the name of a town as a trademark for a local mall seems naive. However, they went ahead and filed a trademark application for the name "Natick."   Needless to say, the town of Natick objected.  Ultimately, the mall was renamed "Natick Collection."  Funnily enough, this was on the list of names to begin with and it was rejected in favor of just "Natick."  Granted, I've sat in my share of branding meetings over the years where weak names, copied ideas, and just plain silliness was bandied about as serious marketing, but this one struck me as one of the most short-sighted branding decisions I've seen in awhile. 

The main point of a brand name is to differentiate the product or service from all the other alternatives.  At the same time, you want to connect to your audience's preferences, recollections, memories, or sensibilities. You also want to consider your customer audience.  What will resonate for them? It seems like it would be a tad confusing for a resident of Natick to call a friend and say, "Let's go shopping at Natick."  Uh, where in Natick?   "You know, the mall, Natick."  "Yeah, but WHERE in Natick?" Seems a bit like Abbott & Costello's bit about "Who's on First?"   

So when you're playing the name game, really think hard about the customers you're trying to entice to your offering.  Will they be upset by the name?  Confused  by it? Oblivous to it?  Rule number one:  don't use another entity's name!  The customer you offend or confuse may be your own! 

  --Lisa Dennis