Westin St. Francis Marketing WIN

Switching it up a little bit this time. I'm reading 'The Book of Business Awesome / The Book of Business UnAwesome'. It's a two-in-one book, where part one discusses how businesses succeed to create awesome marketing, and the other side (near and dear to this blog) are a bunch of marketing fails.

I've been inspired by the 'awesome' side of author Scott Stratten's book, and decided to share a story of my own from my recent honeymoon to California. 

THE EPIC MARKETING WIN

My wife and I were having a fantastic time on our trip. We spent a week up in Sonoma and Napa and finished our trip with three days in San Francisco. We stayed at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square. One thing that we discovered on our honeymoon, is that most hotels will make your stay extra special when they figure out you're on your honeymoon. The Westin was no exception. They upgraded us to the penthouse floor of the old building, with an awesome room and an even better view of Union Square.

Awesome view - and this isn't even the best part.

We were loving our time in the city. On the Saturday night, we heard that the Giants were playing. Having never been to a game at AT&T Park, we decided this would be a cool experience.

We headed down to the concierge to figure out the best way to get tickets. The concierge gave us kind of a cold greeting, told us the game was sold out and there was essentially no way to get tickets. It was pretty disappointing. I asked if there were any other options to get tickets, even inquired about scalpers, and she just basically just said that we were screwed.

On the elevator back up to our room, I remembered that some of my friends use the website StubHub to get tickets. I never used the site before, but figured it was worth a try. Within 15 minutes, I had bought tickets, printed them in the hotel's business center and we were on our way to the game.

While enjoying garlic fries, looking at the massive StubHub ad in the outfield and seeing Tim Lincecum pitch an almost flawless game, we heard this was the 127th consecutive sellout. I thought about how many other people have been to that concierge, and were told unnecessarily that they simply couldn't go to the game?

Sellouts don't matter with StubHub.

When I got back to Ottawa, I got a customer satisfaction survey from Starwood Hotels. At the end, in an attempt to help them improve, I left a little comment about how the concierge could have been more aware of alternative ticket options. Shortly afterwards, I got a call and an email from the hotel's Guest Services manager. She offered her apologies and said that their concierge's are supposed to know about these options, but they would be giving them a refresher. I was happy to hear that no one else would unnecessarily need to miss the game, and that they were going to do something with my feedback... but it doesn't end there.

The Guest Services Manager asked me for my address, so she could send me 'a Giants baseball momento'. I gave it to her and forgot that I did, until a couple weeks later, I got a package from Fedex. 

Giants momento.

Inside there was a nice handwritten letter from the hotel, a baseball hat AND a shirt. This was above and beyond what they needed to do, but it showed that they really cared.

I am obviously a little biased now, but I've also stayed in a lot of hotels in San Francisco. If you want to stay an an awesome hotel, that could not be in a better location and that cares (a lot) about their guests, then checkout the Westin St. Francis.

Have you guys experienced a similar situation? I would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment in the comment section below.

Why does RIM already hate the Blackberry 10?

[DISCLAIMER]

Hello, my name is Pierce Ujjainwalla, and I am an iPhone user. So despite my bias in phones, let me reassure everyone that my phone preference has nothing to do with the following post. 

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

RIM seems to be trying to get in touch with their hipster side with their recent commercials featuring [well known?] artists like Diplo, the Martinez Brothers and most recently Meridith Valiando.

The most recent instalment features the founder of the DigiTour, a company that creates music tours featuring self-made YouTube sensations. The founder, Meridith, says 'I get somewhere around a thousand emails a day... try writing a thousand emails on a touch screen!'. 

"Try writing a thousand emails on a touch screen!"

Although I don't find it hard to write emails on a touch screen, maybe some people do. Fair enough. Blackberry has the keyboard, a main product differentiator. Good - they are positioning themselves in the market for people who write lots of emails, and offer keyboards on the phones to do it. Great strategy... annnnnd let me now present to you RIM's newest phone, coming out later this year... The Blackberry 10:

Where is the keyboard?

Timing is everything.

The commercial taking a shot at touch screens was aired right around the same time as the world was getting the first sneak peaks at the Blackberry 10. And let me just say, the Blackberry 10 has some pretty awesome features like predictive words and a really cool camera feature that allows you to dynamically change elements of the photo on the fly. In any case, their marketing was not supporting the new phone.

I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason for why this happened, however it's unfortunate that they were not airing commercials that generated buzz for their new phone as opposed to bashing the very features it will have.

The good news about all of this is that the phone looks like it can sell itself and hopefully when the phone is released later this year people will have forgotten all about Meridith and how hard it is to type emails on a touch screen.

QR Code FAIL

I was driving home last week when I saw my inspiration for the first blog post. An epic marketing fail in it's purest form.

QR code on highway on-ramp

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

When you first look at this image, hopefully the epic marketing fail hits you like a wrench to the face. If not, if you are sitting there thinking "these QR codes are neat and putting them on the side of the highway on-ramp might be a good use of my marketing dollars", then please read this post in it's entirety - I'd like to save you some money.

QR codes are like bar codes. Once scanned they automatically take you to a pre-defined URL that is programmed into the code. These codes are commonly used in print ads to get people from a static ad to an interactive web experience.

I'm guessing the person who put this sign up has never tried to scan one of these codes. If they did they would know that you need to be within a few inches of the code and keep your phone perfectly still for 5-10 seconds before it recognizes it.

I think I'm a pretty good multitasker and driver, but the idea of trying to scan a QR code while accelerating to 100km/h and merging into another lane of traffic is just inhuman. Even if I decided to try scanning this thing, I'd need my QR reader app opened first and be a navy seal QR code sniper to get the thing scanned at that speed.

The failure of this sign rattled my marketing world so much so that I pulled a U-turn, parked in a nearby parking lot and walked up the on-ramp at 11pm at night with my fiancee. I had to know who thought this would be a good idea.

I located the sign, loaded the QR app on my iPhone, kneeled down, pointed my phone at the sign from 7 inches away and timed myself to see how long it look for it to read the sign. The whole process took 42 seconds and then I got to the homepage of this website: www.tirechangers.ca.

This is why I want to do this blog. I want to help other marketers from making the same mistake. TireChangers is actually a great idea. They come to your house and change your tires (very important here in snowy canadian winters) so that you don't have to go through the hassle of bringing your car into the garage. Brilliant business idea, however the marketing could use some work.

THE UN-FAILURE

Top 5 tips to avoid your QR code from ending up on Epic Marketing Fails:

1. Make them easy to scan

Think about your audience. They are going to have to take out their phone, find their QR reader app amongst their 162 other apps and wait for it to load. Then they will need to position their phone on the code in the perfect position and wait for the app to recognize the code. This takes time and some patience.

2. Provide clear call-to-action

People are too busy these days to just randomly scan your QR code for the fun of it. You need to give them a reason to scan your code. A discount, a recipe, or a piece of information that they cannot get anywhere else are some good starting points.

3. Make your ad stand on it's own

In a perfect marketing world you create a great compelling ad that makes everyone scan your QR code, but the reality is that the majority of your audience will not scan your code. That doesn't mean that the ad is a waste. Use the bulk of the ad to build your brand and educate your audience. 

4. Build on your ad

Don't send people to your homepage from your QR code. The landing page they get sent to should tie into the ad that they got there from and complete the story that you are trying to tell them. Make it feel personal, like you know where they are coming from and create an experience for the prospect.

5. Track your success

In this day in age, marketers should be able to justify how much revenue they are driving from each of their marketing activities. Ads in which QR codes are being used are no different. Technology has made this possible, but it is still challenging to get to that point. If you aren't there yet, you need to start somewhere, whether it's website hits, # of new customers or pipeline - track something that will enable you to determine if it was a good use of your money.

That's it for this one. Let me know what you guys think. Is this an epic marketing fail? Have you seen worse? I want to hear about them! Over-and-out.

Why this blog is not a fail.

I have been thinking about doing a blog for a while now, but since there are millions of blogs out there now about marketing, I thought I would take a slightly different approach.

I would like this to be an educational blog, with a twist. That twist will be that I will post epic marketing fails, outline why they are fails, and what they could have done different to turn those fails into wins.

What I have noticed is that there are several consistencies with fail blogs/videos/pictures:

• Bicycles
• Alcohol
• Rope swings
• Skateboards
• Car accidents
• News reporters
• People falling down

While these things are all entertaining to watch, you rarely walk away learning something that could actually help your life/career/business... okay maybe I did learn you shouldn't try to karate chop coconuts on a hard metal railing:

My hope is that by breaking down where some of our fellow marketers have gone wrong, that we can all have a laugh and maybe even learn something from it.

Let's see how this goes. I have a couple of ideas for my first post, but I will have to think about what I want to start with.