A Day at Works

Back to brand development…. this afternoon we invite a team from an advertising agency simply to share what they make have done for previous weeks after our briefing. We aim for maintain loyalty of our customers by developing comunity events and since the customer base we have is customer with middle-low income level thus we think we would balance what we can give and what we demand from them. Simply we would make them loyal but also maintaining their expectation slightly higher than competitor only… loyal not because what we give, but loyalty which means they ready to sacrifice for the brand.

And the recommendation is very standard from marketing science perspective although wrap-up with sophisticated and foreign axioms, phrase, picture and so on: ensure we target the right customer by exploring segments might be available and their potencies – jump to what might be their needs – jump again to core value and position we should establish on the mind and heart of those customers.

The problem.. and this is very big and often is that they make a presentation just by introducing brand buzz word, and jumping from one concept to another without data basis. Since they are the creative people they perhaps ignoring the fact that imagination without ratioale is just another day dreaming….

Unfortunately books about brand also make similar approach, lack of scientific background… at least from behavioral science. From left brain dominance perspective, brand development should be justifiable by hard fact, any initiatives should able to answer following (minimum) questions:

1. Brand is a name, so what is a natural thought generally emerge when people see and experience the product? If we have a donout like bread, what’s pop out in the mind of people who see it? a donout, a tart, or what?? When we can understand the natural thought we can determine how far we can differ? Remember that very small difference make the name not even remembered, but to overwhelming such as naming a chinese little dumb face dog with “Mozart” also make an iritation.

2. If we develop the value behind the brand, is it raise expectation unnecessarily? Do we actually doing suicide by setting high expectation without preparing operations just because we want someday our operations be there? If this happen thus the end of brand development is not brand loyalty but just stuck in brand awareness and activation. .. people should remember again the matrix of Kano, or motivational theory from Herzberg.

3. Does the return on investment can satisfy us? Many brand becoming very popular but popular just for the unpotential market. What’s the benefit is a Mercedes popular to youngster of middle low income level? Preparing when they become tycon if the economy boom again? Remember the brand trust concept,… I’m being remembered again by fellow blogger on this case.

4, Is there any measure to navigate the company dealing with brand management? or we just have survey on attitude which probably never proven to be a behavior?

So I am waiting for a local brand or creative agency which not only creative but also rational. A marketing consultant which not only very conceptual but also have a ground breaking creativity….

Customer loyalty across industry is declining, driving a new paradigm of managing customer. Instead of pushing loyalty to certain product, you needs to realize that customer’s need is growing thus migration must be managed to the way profitable for the firm. In managing customer migration, you need to understand the indication of migration, and redevelop value.

But before you manage migration, you must sure whether customer migrate or defect. Defection is occurred when customer value (what value customer seek for) is remain the same but competitor offering is better. Migration is occurred when customer value is changes because:
1) customer need is changing due to changes in lifecycle and/ or social status, for instance mini sedan buyer migrate to buy medium sedan
2) customer seek variety due to active competitor, for instance apparel buyer who buy from new designer who do promotion. Based on above reason then we understand indications whether customer will migrate or not.

Value redevelopment can be conducted by many ways, from the most essential to the most superficial: 1) product re-design, 2) enhance delivery channel and 3) developing marketing program –after understanding why customer see existing offering is not relevant anymore, and whether customer will come back.
Product redesign commonly happened when the product status is decreasing, for instance Volvo is considered as vehicle chosen for executives, but as Volvo maintaining its value proposition, corporate executive nowadays changes to be younger, and casual thus making BMW more relevant. To gain back his position, then Volvo design is changing to be more casual and feminism.
Delivery channel enhancement can be conducted by enhancing frontline’s service skills, adding augmented value in delivery such as tracking system. Developing marketing program includes developing loyalty rewards, and ways to enable cross loyalty.

The idea of loyalty program is good. The firm identify loyal customer, rewards them based on their personal needs captured by firm’s dB through data mining activities.

The problem is that the programs have already become generic. The rewards is similar, the system is mechanistic – thus although customer is greet personally, we know that the system actually do it. “We are bits of data not a person”, customer said. As the result the program fail to develop true loyalty of customers, even worse customers getting loyal to the one giving the more rewards or loyal to the rewards NOT the firm who provide it. Customer would go shopping at Metro when Metro Dept Store giving more points and discount than Matahari. As program become commodity, the programs becoming the cost of doing business for those industry, i.e. as an entry barrier. As an escape, firms back to customer service and brand (precisely branded experience) – the two, that are could not be copied easily.

The second problem is that, as program could not cover all customer need, then program becoming segmented and educate customer to loyal in certain ways or behavior. For instance take a look HSBC Credit Card. This Credit Card attracts certain customer, that is a group of customer who travel a lot. All benefit provided by HSBC tend to cover on traveling, thus customers will use HSBC Card when they are on a traveling or vacation. For food (restaurant, café, etc.), customers now using Mega Visa and for car related need they use AstraWorld Credit Card (co-branding with BCA, and BII).

So actually we educate customers to loyal to certain program (for this example are programs linkage to credit cards), related to certain behavior or partial loyalty. A young dynamic individual who drive a Yaris, would use AstraWorld Credit Card when having a transaction at workshop, but when he wants to see a firm at 21 Cineplex, he would use BCA Visa, and when he has a dining with friend he will use Mega Visa.

So what’s the solution?

A: When we want a clan, create for them a common culture which then create a community (~ having something in common). You can do it by establishing value, communicate and express the value throughout verbal and non verbal ways, and creating unique artifacts.

“A large part of what a good boss does is expedite things for employees – that is, help them get their jobs done by removing obstacles. This is not at all the same as ‘making sure’ they get their jobs done by raising the anxiety level. Most people are anxious enough already.” -David Sirota, head of Sirota Survey Intelligence, a research firm headquartered in Purchase, N.Y., that has surveyed millions of employees in Fortune 500 companies since its founding in 1972.

3 goals at work: fairness, achievement and camaraderie

In his book, “The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want” (Wharton School Publishing), Sirota conclude from researches that people in general have 3 goals at work: fairness, achievement and camaraderie. If these 3 goals are met, you have enthusiastic employees.

What he means by fairness is employee wants to feel that they are being recognized and rewarded fairly. Achievement means that employee wants to be proud of the organization and their place in it. Camaraderie means employee wants good working relations and a sense of belonging to a team.

The trouble is that, morale among new hires is high and by about 6 month has dropped sharply. Management has destroyed it. One thing bad bosses do is to deliberately make people feel insecure about their jobs. Another is treat employees like children or criminals instead of like responsible adults.

Sign of Bad Boss

A sign of a really bad boss is micromanaging, which Sirota define as devoting punitive amount of attention to minute. Employee has to raise his hand if they want to go to restroom. Another sign is no positive feedback.
All of this behavior of bad boss derived from a combination of an over positive self concept with theory X which see others always negative.

Why should companies care whether employees are enthusiastic or not, as long as the work gets done?

Many research evident show a direct link between employee morale and the overall performance of the firm, including stock price. The correlation is a result of how employees treated is reflected to how employees treat customers.

Since most bosses, including the bad one, always think they are doing the right thing thus management should always 360-degree evaluation to have constructive critics and an open dialogue to make sure people giving an honest feedback.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn’t the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he’s renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It’s the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths — the 1% of the general population that isn’t burdened by conscience.

Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life “games” they can win — and take pleasure from their power over other people.

On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.
“These are callous, cold-blooded individuals,” Hare said.
“They don’t care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse.” He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life’s savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.
Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. “Why wouldn’t we want to screen them?” he asked. “We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?”

It’s Hare’s latest contribution to the public awareness of “corporate psychopathy.” He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film’s premise that corporations are “sociopathic” (a synonym for “psychopathic”) because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests — “shareholder value” — without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It’s a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren’t just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We’re worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they’re lifting profits and stock prices, we’re willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.
But wait, you say: Don’t bona fide psychopaths become serial killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted, that’s still an unusually good place to look for the conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible 40. A score of around 20 qualifies as “moderately psychopathic.” Only 1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is “highly psychopathic,” the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below that is “sliding into sainthood.”

On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there’s plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you’re likely to find such people as Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as “moderately psychopathic”; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” Hare told Fast Company. “There are certainly more people in the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension than in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization where, by the nature of one’s position, you have power and control over other people and the opportunity to get something.”

There’s evidence that the business climate has become even more hospitable to psychopaths in recent years. In pioneering long-term studies of psychopaths in the workplace, Babiak focused on a half-dozen unnamed companies: One was a fast-growing high-tech firm, and the others were large multinationals undergoing dramatic organizational changes — severe downsizing, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures. That’s just the sort of corporate tumult that has increasingly characterized the U.S. business landscape in the last couple of decades. And just as wars can produce exciting opportunities for murderous psychopaths to shine (think of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic), Babiak found that these organizational shake-ups created a welcoming environment for the corporate killer. “The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change; in fact, he or she thrives on it,” Babiak claims. “Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.”

And you can make a compelling case that the New Economy, with its rule-breaking and roller-coaster results, is just dandy for folks with psychopathic traits too. A slow-moving old-economy corporation would be too boring for a psychopath, who needs constant stimulation. Its rigid structures and processes and predictable ways might stymie his unethical scheming. But a charge-ahead New Economy maverick — an Enron, for instance — would seem the ideal place for this kind of operator.

But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply “the Hare”) to make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into two subsets, or “factors.” Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor 1, the “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others” category. It includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints “chronically unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle,” the hallmarks of people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative accounting.)

This view is supported by research by psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, who interviewed and gave personality tests to 39 high-level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminals and psychiatric patients. The executives were even more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere, and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy. Board and Fritzon concluded that the businesspeople they studied might be called “successful psychopaths.” In contrast, the criminals — the “unsuccessful psychopaths” — were more impulsive and physically aggressive.

The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many corporate power brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. Remorseless? Soon after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western, a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the company’s Manhattan skyscraper. “Those were my enemies,” Davis said. “I got rid of them.” Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to pay for Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump.

In the most recent wave of scandals, Enron’s Fastow displayed many of the corporate psychopath’s traits. He pressured his bosses for a promotion to CFO even though he had a shaky grasp of the position’s basic responsibilities, such as accounting and treasury operations. Suffering delusions of grandeur after just a little time on the job, Fastow ordered Enron’s PR people to lobby CFO magazine to make him its CFO of the Year. But Fastow’s master manipulation was a scheme to loot Enron. He set up separate partnerships, secretly run by himself, to engage in deals with Enron. The deals quickly made tens of millions of dollars for Fastow — and prettified Enron’s financials in the short run by taking unwanted assets off its books. But they left Enron with time bombs that would ultimately cause the company’s total implosion — and lose shareholders billions. When Enron’s scandals were exposed, Fastow pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay back nearly $24 million and serve 10 years in prison.

“Chainsaw” Al Dunlap might score impressively on the corporate Psychopathy Checklist too. What do you say about a guy who didn’t attend his own parents’ funerals? He allegedly threatened his first wife with guns and knives. She charged that he left her with no food and no access to their money while he was away for days. His divorce was granted on grounds of “extreme cruelty.” That’s the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam. Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report. Dunlap needed the protection because so many people despised him. His plant closings kept up his reputation for ruthlessness but made no sense economically, and Sunbeam’s financial gains were really the result of Dunlap’s alleged book cooking. When he was finally exposed and booted, Dunlap had the nerve to demand severance pay and insist that the board reprice his stock options. Talk about failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.

While knaves such as Fastow and Dunlap make the headlines, most horror stories of workplace psychopathy remain the stuff of frightened whispers. Insiders in the New York media business say the publisher of one of the nation’s most famous magazines broke the nose of one of his female sales reps in the 1990s. But he was considered so valuable to the organization that the incident didn’t impede his career.

Most criminals — whether psychopathic or not — are shaped by poverty and often childhood abuse as well. In contrast, corporate psychopaths typically grew up in stable, loving families that were middle class or affluent. But because they’re pathological liars, they tell romanticized tales of rising from tough, impoverished backgrounds. Dunlap pretended that he grew up as the son of a laid-off dockworker; in truth, his father worked steadily and raised his family in suburban comfort. The corporate psychopaths whom Babiak studied all went to college, and a couple even had PhDs. Their ruthless pursuit of self-interest was more easily accomplished in the white-collar realm, which their backgrounds had groomed them for, rather than the criminal one, which comes with much lousier odds.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people’s feelings. This makes it easier for them to “play” us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor’s expertise in evoking ours. While they don’t care about us, “they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them,” says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.
Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. “People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don’t have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it,” says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). “It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us — and so evil. Good people don’t want to believe it.”

Of course, cynics might say that it can be an advantage to lack a conscience. That’s probably why major investors installed Dunlap as the CEO of Sunbeam: He had no qualms about decimating the workforce to impress Wall Street. One reason outside executives get brought into troubled companies is that they lack the emotional stake in either the enterprise or its people. It’s easier for them to act callously and remorselessly, which is exactly what their backers want. The obvious danger of the new B-Scan test for psychopathic tendencies is that companies will hire or promote people with high scores rather than screen them out. Even Babiak, the test’s codeveloper, says that while “a high score is a red flag, sometimes middle scores are okay. Perhaps you don’t want the most honest and upfront salesman.”
Indeed, not every aberrant boss is necessarily a corporate psychopath. There’s another personality that’s often found in the executive suite: the narcissist. While many psychologists would call narcissism a disorder, this trait can be quite beneficial for top bosses, and it’s certainly less pathological than psychopathy. Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Perils of Visionary Leadership (Broadway Books, 2003) portrays the narcissistic CEO as a grandiose egotist who is on a mission to help humanity in the abstract even though he’s often insensitive to the real people around him. Maccoby counts Apple’s Steve Jobs, General Electric’s Jack Welch, Intel’s Andy Grove, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Southwest Airlines’ Herb Kelleher as “productive narcissists,” or PNs. Narcissists are visionaries who attract hordes of followers, which can make them excel as innovators, but they’re poor listeners and they can be awfully touchy about criticism. “These people don’t have much empathy,” Maccoby says. “When Bill Gates tells someone, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,’ or Steve Jobs calls someone a bozo, they’re not concerned about people’s feelings. They see other people as a means toward their ends. But they do have a sense of changing the world — in their eyes, improving the world. They build their own view of what the world should be and get others recruited to their vision. Psychopaths, in contrast, are only interested in self.”

Maccoby concedes that productive narcissists can become “drunk with power” and turn destructive. The trick, he thinks, is to pair a productive narcissist with a “productive obsessive,” or conscientious, control-minded manager. Think of Grove when he was matched with chief operating officer Craig Barrett, Gates with president Steve Ballmer, Kelleher with COO Colleen Barrett, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison with COO Ray Lane and CFO Jeff Henley. In his remarkably successful second tour of duty at Apple, Jobs has been balanced by steady, competent behind-the-scenes players such as Timothy Cook, his executive vice president for sales and operations.
But our culture’s embrace of narcissism as the hallmark of admired business leaders is dangerous, Babiak maintains, since “individuals who are really psychopaths are often mistaken for narcissists and chosen by the organization for leadership positions.” How does he distinguish the difference between the two types? “In the case of a narcissist, everything is me, me, me,” Babiak explains. “With a psychopath, it’s ‘Is it thrilling, is it a game I can win, and does it hurt others?’ My belief is a psychopath enjoys hurting others.”

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it’s extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego — something he promotes rather than plunders. “The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self,” Babiak says. “A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game.” That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap — guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever — indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. “An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy,” Babiak says. “But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company’s existence. They’re loyal to the company.” So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a “culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change.”

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The “antibullying” movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard’s Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. “If we continue to go this way in our Western culture,” she says, “evolutionarily speaking, it doesn’t end well.”

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we’ll get more Enrons — and deserve them.

source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare’s PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the “corporate psychopath” — the nonviolent person prone to the “selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others.” Does your boss fit the profile? Here’s our do-it-yourself quiz drawing on the test manual and Hare’s book Without Conscience.

For each question, score two points for “yes,” one point for “somewhat” or “maybe,” and zero points for “no.”

[1] Is he glib and superficially charming?
Is he a likable personality and a terrific talker — entertaining, persuasive, but maybe a bit too smooth and slick? Can he pass himself off as a supposed expert in a business meeting even though he really doesn’t know much about the topic? Is he a flatterer? Seductive, but insincere? Does he tell amusing but unlikely anecdotes celebrating his own past? Can he persuade his colleagues to support a certain position this week — and then argue with equal conviction and persuasiveness for the opposite position next week? If he’s a CEO, can he appear on TV and somehow get away without answering the interviewer’s direct questions or saying anything truly substantive?
SCORE__

[2] Does he have a grandiose sense of self-worth?
Does he brag? Is he arrogant? Superior? Domineering? Does he feel he’s above the rules that apply to “little people”? Does he act as though everything revolves around him? Does he downplay his legal, financial, or personal problems, say they’re just temporary, or blame them on others?
SCORE__

[3] Is he a pathological liar?
Has he reinvented his own past in a more positive light — for example, claiming that he rose from a tough, poor background even though he really grew up middle class? Does he lie habitually even though he can easily be found out? When he’s exposed, does he still act unconcerned because he thinks he can weasel out of it? Does he enjoy lying? Is he proud of his knack for deceit? Is it hard to tell whether he knows he’s a liar or whether he deceives himself and believes his own bull?
SCORE__

[4] Is he a con artist or master manipulator?
Does he use his skill at lying to cheat or manipulate other people in his quest for money, power, status, and sex? Does he “use” people brilliantly? Does he engage in dishonest schemes such as cooking the books?
SCORE__

[5] When he harms other people, does he feel a lack of remorse or guilt?
Is he concerned about himself rather than the wreckage he inflicts on others or society at large? Does he say he feels bad but act as though he really doesn’t? Even if he has been convicted of a white-collar crime, such as securities fraud, does he not accept blame for what he did, even after getting out of prison? Does he blame others for the trouble he causes?
SCORE__

[6] Does he have a shallow affect?
Is he cold and detached, even when someone near him dies, suffers, or falls seriously ill — for example, does he visit the hospital or attend the funeral? Does he make brief, dramatic displays of emotion that are nothing more than putting on a theatrical mask and playacting for effect? Does he claim to be your friend but rarely or never ask about the details of your life or your emotional state? Is he one of those tough-guy executives who brag about how emotions are for whiners and losers?
SCORE__

[7] Is he callous and lacking in empathy?
Does he not give a damn about the feelings or well-being of other people? Is he profoundly selfish? Does he cruelly mock others? Is he emotionally or verbally abusive toward employees, “friends,” and family members? Can he fire employees without concern for how they’ll get by without the job? Can he profit from embezzlement or stock fraud without concern for the harm he’s doing to shareholders or pensioners who need their savings to pay for their retirements?
SCORE__

[8] Does he fail to accept responsibility for his own actions?
Does he always cook up some excuse? Does he blame others for what he’s done? If he’s under investigation or on trial for a corporate crime, like deceitful accounting or stock fraud, does he refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing even when the hard evidence is stacked against him?
SCORE__

Total____

If your boss scores:
1-4 Be frustrated
5-7 Be cautious
8-12 Be afraid
13-16 Be very afraid

source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-quiz.html

Oneday a customer who just bought a luxury car has a phone call. This call is from Ms. Susan, a Relationship Manager of the car dealer he just has visited a week before his recent purchase. In a moment they are in a middle of conversation,… after talk and talk.. Ms. Susan asking whether he has a plan to buy a car, because 3 years ago he bought a nice Camry from the dealer.
Since he has no plan to buy another car, despite the fact that he just have already bought a brand new Mercedes, he calmly said that he might has a plan in the next 3 months, just to ensure the girl still has a nice smile in her face.
Then for about 3 month after, he has cold call again. This time he can easily remember her sweet sound… immediatey after Ms. Susan introduce herself and showing emphaty to his Camry which has its major service after a toll road accident nearly killed him. Different to previous encounter, Ms. Susan surprisingly greet him on his birthday which actually take place one day before.
This situation repeatedly happened: a phone call, and a closing question or offerings. For Ms. Susan she can proudly say that she has a relatioship with customer, she frequently interact with customer.. and often customer also call her back asking for something about car, discount or so on. For this situation Ms. Susan can thanks to massive technology behind, which capture customer’s name, phone humber, b’day, transaction, and other lifestyle information then mining a clue of customer’s future needs.
Although this practice is sweet, but simply has customer’s data such as b’day and greet customer would not necessarily showing the existence of relationship between customer and the firm. Customer would not impressed by a printed greeting card archiving data from central data base maintaining their b’day. As long as customer do not feel the warm emotion in the process, then it is a waste. As long as customer feel we do it just for money, it is a waste.

Think, which is more touching:
1. Mr. Robert buy a car, filling data (including b’day date), Ms. Susan get the date from dB, call him and greet him.
2. Ms. Susan has a conversation with him about his hobby and car, get his b’day date, call him and greet him.

Other example:
1. Mr. Rober go to workshop, the Service Agent record his car problem, Ms. Susan call him whether the car serviced as promised, and next Ms. Susan reminds his next service schedule.
2. Mr. Robert go to workshop, Ms. Susan call him asking whether he need trasport to the office, and next Ms. Susan call him again checking whether the car in good condition to make sure Mr. Robert not necessarily late to the office.

The point is that relationship only can established between human. System to make this relationship easier is important, but the one that guarantee relationship is frontline’s attitudes.
The content of relationship must be no money-oriented, and the context is as customer prefer.

If Ms. Susan has a bunch of data and sophisticated media, but while call customer she show no enthusiasm then it is useless. When Ms. Susan show right attitude backup with data and system, but just to offer customer products, to make a sale then it is useless. When Ms. Susan call customer in the wrong time, wrong place, wrong media, and wrong approach then it is also useless.

So a firm can said they develop CRM when they ensure all employees serve customer from the heart, which only can if the management and leader treat employee with respect.

From customer perspective, quality is the ability of the product to fulfill its promise to solve customer’s problem. From company perspective, high quality reduces (potential) cost. Low quality yield for additional cost, high quality input, process and output do not.
When quality product or when delivery met expectation then customer will be satisfied but satisfied customer does not always come back for repurchase and spreading good word-of-mouth. This reality broke the Service Profit Chain concept.
Satisfied customer actually indifferent in his/her attitude toward the product, thus in this stage customer service initiative generally is fruitless, even increasing customer expectation or hygiene factors. Then company should aware that customer service initiative sometimes is a long and hard decision. In macro level this decision is similar to phenomenon that increasing production capacity or go to capital intensive will eventually produce less profit for the whole industry.
CRM concept as a verbose has many definitions, but simply it is an initiative to identify, keep, and develop profitable and loyal customers. CRM is advancement of CS, it ensure that customer service activities directed to the right customer, that is: who can be loyal to company as well as provide profits in the long-term relationship. CRM then make sure company effort will keep desired customer from churning, and develop this customer in term of involvement, trust and commitment (3 basic elements of attitudinal loyalty) and behavior (transaction: referral and repurchase; form of repurchase: buying the same product, other group of product or cross-selling, and buying higher margin product or up-selling).

Thus when company wants to calculate accountability of CS activities such as B’day greetings, executive lounge or simply extra discount then company should move to CRM.

Recently I have read “Loyalty Myths”. I think this is a B+ grade book in loyalty marketing. Find it at bookstore…. but before it I’ll share some myths….

Customer Satisfaction brings Customer Loyalty (Myth 45)

Merely satisfied customer not necessarily loyal, only delighted customer tends to loyal because relationship of satisfaction and loyalty is not linear. Besides satisfaction, brand imagery determines loyalty.

Spending on Customer Service increases Customer Loyalty (Myth 41)

Spending on the core of what customer value at will create customer delight then in turn loyalty. The important thing is that many businesses are not driven by services, but product. Think about consumer package goods (Coca Cola for instance), and automotive in which customer is more driven by brand and functional value of the product.Spending on additional and non-core service, such as a Birthday Greeting Card toward automotive customer would not automatically turn them to loyal.

Frequent Contact increases Loyalty (Myth 32)

This is a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Loyal customer tends to purchase frequently, and not otherwise. Delighted customer tend to be loyal customer, loyal customer tends to cognitive, affective and behaviorally committed.

Loyalty Rewards Programs will Solve Customer Attrition Problems (Myth 34)

Loyalty Programs can’t save bad product/ service. If an airline consistently cancelled your flight, would frequent flier miles really matter? The truth is consumer ranked Frequent Flier Programs at the bottom, just a head of airline food.Loyalty Programs which is not providing real value to customer will not contribute to customer delight. The programs otherwise educate customer to delay purchase, at certain periodic promotional events.

Firms should Emphasize Retention rather than Acquisition (Myth 2)

This Myth broke Product Life Cycle and Company Life Cycle Concepts. Retention is a sound strategy when the product/ company stay in maturity or decline stage. On introduction stage, the key is brand awareness, while of growth stage is customer acquisition / market share. Observe Apple which to soon focus on retention strategy before enough share to accumulate. Apple’s growth is steadily small compared to un-sophisticated Microsoft. Retention also rational when firms already satisfied to profitability of current customer portfolio and acquisition of new customer is relatively expensive. On some situation like after product launching, the firm needs to shape profitability of their customer portfolio since majority of customers enjoy special discount facilities. In other case acquisition is cheap, such acquiring walk-in customer to our Restaurant located at high traffic mall.

Customer wants to be Loyal and Interested in having a Monogamous Relationship (Myth 18, 19)

Customers nowadays want simplicity, they refuse unnecessary involvement. So relationship won’t work well in low-risk item or when customers generally buy the product on impulse or triggered by the need of variety. Even in B2B, customers want to reduce cost of purchase: time, risk and relationship. If customers involved in the purchase, they always have a back-up if possible to minimize risk. Customers more safely have a polygamous relationship.

Loyalty can’t be bough; it has to be earned (Myth 31)

Firm can’t bribe customers to earn their TRUE loyalty, but as loyalty reward program flourish customers learn to buy product/ service solely to get financial rewards or exploit the system. The extreme example of loyalty program hacker is David Philips who spent $ 3,140 on pudding cups at Healthy Choice to get $ 1.25 million American Airline frequent flier miles (worth 48 free domestic airline tickets and 12,000 desserts). If they won’t exploit the system, customers have well understood when to make a purchase – the promotional season. That’s why sales increase during promotion and decline after it. As loyalty reward program tend to establish exit barrier, customers focus their transaction to how much they already accumulated, not to awards they can win.

MarkPlus dalam blog-nya menyatakan bahwa merek yang kuat hanya akan menciptakan loyalty bila tetap menjadi identitas produk secara individual. MarkPlus dan seperti Marketing Consultant lainnya memberikan resep bahwa brand yg kuat - yg diukur dari brand equity (Ingat David Aaker’s brand awareness, association, perceived quality, dan brand loyalty) – bersumber dari brand trust.

Sebelum melangkah lebih jauh kepada analogi yang disajikan marketing witchcraft ini, pertanyaan yang perlu dijawab adalah: “Apakah merek yang menciptakan loyalty merupakan merek yang menguntungkan?” Sayangnya jawabannya adalah Belum Tentu.
Merek seperti Harley Davidson, dan Apple merupakan merek-merek yang dicintai bahkan menjadi inspirasi baik customer maupun perusahaan pesaing dalam industrinya masing-masing. Loyalitas customer merek-merek ini sampai saat ini tidak diragukan, namun apakah benar merek-merek ini jauh lebih menguntungkan daripada Honda, Microsoft dan Dell yang lebih konvensional dan tidak menciptakan emotional bonding istimewa dengan customernya? Buku Loyalty Myth yang mengupas mitos loyalitas mengupas bahwa dewasa ini businessman telah terlalu banyak dicekoki mitos loyalitas sehingga tujuan business dibengkokkan menjadi memuaskan pelanggan sedangkan kalimat terusannya “….secara menguntungkan” menjadi terabaikan. (marketing is satisfying customer need profitably)

Journal of Product and Management, menunjukkan bahwa brand trust terbentuk dari keterandalan merek memenuhi janjinya (brand reliability) dan kemampuan merek menciptakan minat dan niat untuk membeli (brand intention). Riset sebelumnya menunjukkan bahwa kekuatan merek terutama tidak ditentukan oleh komunikasi, dan popularitas yang intinya adalah menciptakan janji dan persepsi kemampuan merek untuk memberikan kualitas yang diinginkan namun lebih dari brand reliability, ketepatan janji. Seorang Warren Buffet mungkin tidak setenar George Soros, namun jelas bahwa rata-rata return jangka panjang yang dihasilkan Berkshire Hathaway Inc. lebih besar dari Quantum Fund. Bergerak dari sana ternyata riset terkini menemukan bahwa brand intention lebih besar lagi pengaruhnya. Hal ini seperti halnya seorang Investor akan lebih tertarik untuk menanamkan uangnya pada Fund yang lebih accessible (dan mungkin membutuhkan settlement lebih kecil) daripada Berkshire Hathaway Inc., seperti Barclay Global Investor, Fidelity (Prudential, Egg, dll.), ataupun CitiGroup.

Sekali lagi business yang dapat dipertanggungjawabkan adalah yang memberikan bandingan top line (marketing cost dan pencapaiannya seperti popularitas dan sales) dengan bottom line (profit). Loyalitas itu baik, namun bukan tujuan utama bisnis. Dan merek yang kuat adalah merek yang memberikan keuntungan sekarang maupun yang akan datang.