It's Not Just a Bag

Anything that reminds people about your organization is a representative for your brand.

Hence we have logos - visual representations of the corporate identity of a brand. We have advertising campaigns, carefully planned to accurately convey a brand's identity and proposed value to consumers. We have colors, fonts, store designs, soundtracks, and even smells that are strategically chosen for what they say about their respective brands.

But other things speak for your brand as well:

          Your partners (I blogged about that last week).
          Your product packaging (I blogged about that two weeks ago).
          Your facilities (how tidy are they?).
          Your corporate vehicles (how often do you wash them?).

          Your shopping bags.

Shopping bags (and other distribution packaging) have great - and often underused - potential as branding tools. Well-designed and attractively-branded shopping bags provide two marketing tactics in one:

• First, they serve as free advertising - distributing your logo, willingly, through the hands of every customer.
• Second, they serve as social proof - every customer seen with your shopping bag indicates support of your brand to those around them. And as Robert Cialdini would tell us, observing the approval of others towards a brand gives permission to new potential customers to try the brand, too.

Bloomingdales does an outstanding job of using shopping bags as branded items. People notice the cute, clever "Little Brown Bags" with which Bloomingdales customers leave their stores. The more customers shop at Bloomingdales, the more those Little Brown Bags are seen by others, and the more other people see public approval of the Bloomingdales brand.

FedEx also uses their "shopping bags" (aka their boxes) well. Every time you receive a package via FedEx, you see the FedEx logo, and are given another example of a customer who used FedEx for their shipping needs.

Start-up companies can use branded shopping bags to great advantage as they work to build brand recognition. Each time a customer carries out a branded shopping bag, the organization receives another instance of free advertising in the community, and another testimony of a [presumably satisfied] customer.

And to be remarkable, shopping bags need not be simple plastic bags stamped with a logo (although they very well could be). Why not use your shopping bags as another opportunity to exhibit great design? Why stick with a one-color print on plastic? Why not make your shopping bags something that are fun and attractive to carry around? Something that reinforces your brand's personality?

So, how are your shopping bags representing you? Do they speak your name in a clever, fun, innovative, or attractive way? Or do they speak your name at all?

Empty Restaurants and Dying Malls

Recently, some friends and I decided to have dinner together at an Italian restaurant in our town. This particular restaurant was a local favorite; however, I had never eaten there before, and my friends had not eaten there since it moved to its current location one year previous. So all of us were quite excited about our dinner plans.

Until we got to the restaurant.

We walked into the restaurant shortly after 6:00 on a Thursday evening; the place was empty. As is, zero customers. None. Zilch. The lights were on, the tables were set, the servers and chefs were there and ready to go. But my two friends and I were the only non-employees in the place.

That seemed rather odd, since it was already an hour into dinnertime, on a not-quite-weekend night. And at a well-known local restaurant. There was no explanation for it - the room had not been reserved for a large party. It was simply a regular evening. With no customers.

After consulting for a moment or two, my friends and I bade a polite goodbye to the hostess and decided to patronize another restaurant for the evening.

Why? Why did we decide to leave?

Robert Cialdini would explain it as a principle that he calls "social proof."

Social proof is the idea that we as human beings - and especially as consumers - infer truths about a situation based upon how others act in that situation.

You attend a get-together at the home of some new acquaintances, and notice that all of the other guests have removed their shoes as they entered the front door; you presume that removing shoes is the policy in this house, and so you remove yours, too.

You walk down the street and notice numbers of people gathering at one particular location and staring up into the sky. You assume there must be something unusual to see in the sky, so you stop and look up, too.

Social proof tends to be especially strong in unfamiliar situations in which the proper behavior is unknown. When we are not sure how to act, we take our cues from the actions of people around us.

In the case of my friends and me at the restaurant, we took our cues from the absence of people around us. We thought it unusual to find a restaurant empty at 6pm on a Thursday; and while we didn't know of anything specifically wrong with the restaurant, we presumed that there must be some reason for customers to be staying away. For lack of better answers, we felt it safer to stay away as well.

Social proof can be a powerful force, for good or ill. If you are a new business, and you give free t-shirts and hats to your all of your customers for the first six months, others who begin to see your logo everywhere will likely infer that you must be a good brand (everyone is going there, after all), and be prompted to investigate and learn more about your company. If you have an excellent product or service and all of your customers continually rave about your brand to their friends, those friends will likely try your product the next time they have a need which your product might solve.

Conversely, if you are a restaurant with zero customers in the middle of a given night, then those potential customers who arrive may likely decide to leave. If you are a shopping mall with 20% of your storefronts empty, then mall shoppers (and potential tenants) may likely infer that something about the mall prevents it from attracting enough customers to make the retailers profitable, and may likely stay away themselves.

How can your organization noticeably provide excellent experiences to all of your customers, such that others will be positively affected by their social proof?

Einstein Bros. and Soft Openings

Today an Einstein Bros. Bagels is opening on the campus of the university where I work. Since most of the students will not arrive until this weekend (Monday is the first day of classes for the spring), the store has three solid days to practice their craft before their biggest customers arrive.

Thus, this Einstein Bros. location will enjoy an abbreviated "soft opening."

On this, their first day of their "soft opening," the store will not be selling food. Instead, they are giving it away.

The store has been distributing a limited number of vouchers for free samples. Each voucher lists a particular food item and a time of day during which the customer may receive the food item. (Mine says, "Bagel Dog & Choice of Blended or Coffee Beverage, 12:30-12:50") Customers may choose from a selection of 10-12 vouchers, and return to the store at the specified time to pick up the specified item.

This seems like a great idea for our new Einstein Bros. store for several reasons:

1. It gives the new employees a chance to practice, without wasting any food. And even if the trainees don't get a food item exactly right, they (hopefully) will not anger or alienate their customers, since the customers understand that these employees are still in training.


2. It builds excitement for the store, as customers get to taste a sample of the food and drinks that Einstein Bros. has to offer. And even for customers who arrive too late to receive a voucher, the anticipation builds as they await their opportunity to purchase something from Einstein Bros. and taste for themselves.


3. It starts a cycle of reciprocity, that principle discussed by Robert Cialdini that states that people tend to return favors. Giving away free samples helps to build goodwill for a business; when customers get free samples, they often feel compelled to support that business later.

And so, unless the employees drastically mess up the food today and create a huge fiasco of customer fury, today's soft opening seems like a great opportunity for Einstein Bros.

I could, however, imagine a situation in which a strategy like this would not work for a particular restaurant. If the food items are especially difficult to prepare and master, then loudly publicizing the distribution of free food could be risky. If a huge number of customers hear about the opening and then receive free food that is not fit to eat, the restaurant could be stuck with a bad reputation that proves impossible to overcome. A restaurant in that situation may want to open more quietly.

Responding to Loss Aversion

One interesting chapter in Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin (no, not that one), and Robert Cialdini, talks about the law of loss aversion. That is, that human beings are more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains.

In other words, people are more motivated to avoid losing what they have than they are to try gaining something more.

An example used by Cialdini, et. al. is that of New Coke. In the 1980's, Coca-Cola discovered that people liked the sweeter taste of Pepsi than they did the taste of Coke. So Coca-Cola developed a new formula - New Coke - and, like good marketers, ran taste tests. Folks liked the taste of New Coke better than the taste of the Old Coke (and when they were told which was which, an extra 6 percent of testers liked the New Coke better than when they tested blind).

So Coca-Cola yanked the old Coke from the shelves, and released New Coke.

The result? Disaster. Angry consumers. Public outcry. (Even more so than when Facebook updates its look periodically.) Coca-Cola soon got rid of the New Coke and returned the original formula to the stores.

Why did this happen? Because although people may have liked the New Coke, they would not take it at the expense of the Old Coke they knew and loved.

Has this happened to you as a consumer? You discover a favorite breakfast cereal, or ice cream shop, or hair care product, and the manufacturer discontinues it? Oh, the hurt and agony!

Why are humans wired this way? Is it a generally positive desire for life? - we don't want anything to "die" or be suddenly and permanently no longer accessible to us? Or is it a foolish and selfish impulse? Or is it neutral?

And how should marketers respond to this? They seem to already make use of this principle when they announce specials like, "Limited Time Only!" or "Don't Miss This Opportunity!" Those announcements seem like a reasonable thing to do. Warn your customers if something is about to become scarce or unavailable, so that they can get it while they can.

(But don't be manipulative with it. I remember some distinct instances of price-gouging on things like gasoline and plywood during hurricane season in Florida. It's not cool. Don't be a jerk. Customers don't like it.)

Are there other proper responses to the law of aversion? Like reserving one last batch of your discontinued product, and selling it to discount stores where your most fanatically loss-averse customers can still find it for a little while? Or offering the last batch only to your most loyal - and loss-averse - fans (you know - the ones you're supposed to be building relationships with through your social media platforms)?

How can your company respond to the law of loss aversion in a way that benefits both yourself and your customers?

Radical honesty is in your best interest

Do you remember the Miracle on 34th Street customer service phenomenon?

In the 1947 movie, Santa Claus comes to work for Macy's department store, and promptly starts sending Macy's customers to other stores when Macy's prices are higher than those of competitors.

The result? Rather than hurting Macy's sales, this practice draws more and more customers to shop at Macy's, effectively boosting sales and causing competitors to follow suit in sending customers to other stores for cheaper prices.

Why? Why did sending customers to competitors cause Macy's to gain more customers and more sales?

Because customers like honesty. We like people we can trust. When a person (or company) openly admits his weaknesses (like Macy's charging higher prices than a competitor), his listeners believe that he is acting out of their best interests, not his own. The company who practices this becomes known as (to quote Mr. Macy) "the helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart." And people like to do business with that kind of company.

Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert Cialdini cite real-life examples of this principle in their book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. They quote the U.S. debut of the original Volkswagen Beetle ("Ugly is only skin deep"); Avis rental cars ("Avis. We're #2, but we try harder. When you're not #1, you have to."); and Listerine mouth wash ("Listerine: the taste you hate three times a day." Progressive car insurance proudly advertises its comparisons with competitors - even when competitors' insurance rates are cheaper than Progressives'. Since Progressive began comparing rates, it has continued to grow an average of 17% per year.

What other industries could use this technique to improve customer service? Automakers? Electronics? Universities?

Are you using this principle to better serve your customers? Do your customers know they can trust you?