(This is a guest post by Dan Clay of the Customer Contact Council, our sister program for call center executives.)

Needless to say (especially living in Washington, DC) it’s hard to find a conversation topic that elicits the same reaction from everyone.  But my experience working in customer service reveals one commonality across all ages, nationalities, races, and eye colors:  If you tell someone you work in customer service, they’ll tell you their latest call center catastrophe.

Your former classmate was transferred four times before he found out why his computer screen went blue.  Your aunt could have swept the floors of Madison Square Garden in the time it took her cable company to pick up the phone.  And all your friend’s husband wants to know is what it takes to talk to a human being.  Like it or not, these stories reflexively pour out whenever we answer the inevitable question, “What do you do?”

Our industry certainly receives a disproportionate share of public scorn.  But thankfully, some comedians channel this frustration into something funnier than the typical cocktail party venting session.  Which brings me to my question: What’s the funniest customer service scene you’ve seen?

Mine, without contest, comes during an Ellen Degeneres stand-up routine.  While questioning the necessity of instructions on shampoo bottles (is it really that complicated?), Ellen envisions the confused callers the shampoo 1-800 line must handle.

Ellen’s of course not the only comedian to crack us up at customer service’s expense.  Seinfeld seemed to have it out for telemarketers and rental car clerks.  Little Britain continues to get laughs every time the computer says no.  Turns out even Mad TV can be funny when it’s poking fun at customer service; the show provides a rare gem in the form of a short-fused fast-food employee seemingly inconvenienced by the mere presence of customers.  (Customer service finally got a moment of glory in Slumdog Millionaire – the hero at one point serves tea in a call center but goes on to become…well, I won’t ruin the ending for those who haven’t seen it already)

To bring this all back to an unfortunate reality: for many people, the funniest YouTube videos about customer service are not from comedians but from real-life company interactions—and the impact from social media negative word of mouth is anything but funny.

MLC members, visit our Customer Experience Topic Center for the latest on how to design the optimal customer experience, get the organization to consistently deliver on it, resolve customer problems, and measure impact in terms of customer loyalty and advocacy.

But back to the fun – will you join me on my break from the day-to-day rigors by answering, what’s your favorite customer service spoof?

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much?

Well, I’ve tasted it.  Several times.  The verdict?  It’s a welcome improvement, but not a nearly-double-your-market-cap-in-three-months kind of improvement.  Essentially, it tastes like they took the old crust and rubbed some garlic butter on it.

So here’s the question: How did a firm spend millions of marketing dollars improving a product, settle on some pretty incremental changes, and translate that into an 84% leap in stock price?

Simple: it’s not what you sell—it’s how you sell.

Now, my point is not that Dominos’ marketing dollars didn’t result in an improved product—they almost certainly did.  But an improved product wasn’t the whole point.  The real reason the company spent millions of marketing dollars was… to say that it had spent millions of marketing dollars.  Why?  Because the message those marketing dollars convey is not only that Domino’s had perfected (or at least improved) its pizza, but also “we listened to you.”

It’s a perfect example of not selling on product features and benefits alone.  Weiner explains:

“I spent a lot of time thinking about how to change the perception of people who didn’t buy Domino’s. We talked to them, and read their blogs, and this is what they were saying. And I knew that, other than my mom, no one would care about “new and improved.” So if we just said, “Hey, this is a new and improved pizza,” we would not have gotten the doubters to try it.”

In other words, Domino’s isn’t saying, “buy our pizza because it has a garlic crust that intoxicates taste buds and stimulates serotonin production.”  Rather, they’re creating an experience around doing business with the company: “you told us our pizza tasted like cardboard, we took time to listen and made changes, so give us a try again!”

Source: youtube.com/nikegolf

Now that the frenzy over the Masters is winding down, let’s take a look at the Tiger ad from Nike.  Smart move by Nike, or not?  More importantly for the Wide Angle readership, are there lessons here for marketers more generally? (Beyond be careful which superstars you get in bed w—sorry, bad choice of words) 

If you look at numbers released Monday after the tournament, it certainly doesn’t look good for Nike.  Confusion, skepticism and other negative emotions reign.

Source: HCD Research, as presented on MediaPost

However, I’d argue running this ad was a clever start by Nike, having made the decision to stay with Tiger.  That is an important caveat—I don’t believe Nike should have stayed with Tiger.  Given that it did, Nike is clearly playing a long game to reshape how we view Tiger, simply because there is no winning short game in this situation. 

So, how could this possibly be a clever move given the numbers above? 

Nike seems to be aiming at a large swath of its target audience (i.e., golfers and athletes more generally) that is in a hazy middle ground of conflicted-ness about Tiger.  These are folks who loved watching and pulling for Tiger in the pre-crisis days, but who are shocked and dismayed at the revelations about Tiger’s behavior.  The question in the back of their mind: Is it okay to root for him again? 

What Nike has done with this ad is spark a public catharsis that can help the conflicted middle start to become un-conflicted.  And it did so by running an ad that focuses on introspection and reflection.  That’s smart.  That’s what Nike wants the middle ground to do right now.  This isn’t about getting consumers to go out and buy golf shoes and equipment.  Not now.  Not yet.

It gets discussion going—in chat rooms, around water coolers, with significant others.  Discussion that will help work through the conflict.  Ultimately, some will choose not to root for Tiger, and will view Nike’s association with Tiger negatively.  Others may find the catharsis and ensuing reflection help them sort through the conflict, and land in a spot where it’s okay to root for Tiger again.  How the story plays out for Nike depends very much on Tiger’s actions from here–trying to predict that would be a fool’s errand. But, given the decision to stick with Tiger, Nike is off to a smart start.

Luckily, most of us aren’t managing brands in the same tricky, high-stakes circumstances.  In my next post, I’ll pull away from the specifics of the Tiger situation to examine the general lessons for other brands.  In the meantime, share your comments and tell the Wide Angle marketing community what you think of Nike’s decision to run this ad, or to stay with Tiger at all.

The Council’s work on marketing communications has always stressed the primacy of client-side creative brief writing. Many heads of advertising will tell us they can ascertain the relative success of a campaign in advance simply by reading the creative brief sent to the agency. Our research shows that the best briefs contain three can’t-miss elements:

1. A precise target audience beyond demographics, including behavior and psychographic traits

2. A core insight that synthesizes the motivations behind consumer behavior (or non-behavior, as the case may be)

3. A single communications task that will move the audience from their current attitude/behavior to the desired attitude/behavior.

Knowing these, it’s difficult not to look at odd-ball television ads and reverse engineer them back to the brief that started it all, wondering if the ad’s ’success’ will merely win it a Cleo or truly accomplish the communications task. Given the marketing and advertising know-how of this blog’s readers, I’d like to start a series designed to get your take on exactly these types of ads, using the key elements of a creative brief as grading criteria. The first ad that came to mind is Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ video that debuted on YouTube in February, made it to television shortly thereafter, and now has nearly six million YouTube views.

The ad is deliberately provocative, and at times, utterly illogical. The actor is speaking directly to females in the commercial, yet the target audience – as stated publicly by Procter & Gamble over the past few years – is teenage males. This audience overlaps tremendously with Unilever’s hyper-sexualized Axe brand. Perhaps the distinction between the two is the addition of the female secondary audience and the impact of that audience on the teenage male purchaser.

So I ask of our readers: does the campaign work? What is the insight behind the campaign that makes it distinct from Axe? Does the associated campaign have a single communications task? Hone your responses by adding a comment above; I’ll add further MLC perspective as the comments expand.There’s no right answer, but this type of thinking can sharpen your saw for the creative briefs you write – ensuring that catchy campaigns also translate to business results.

On the one hand, you have P&G launching the latest, feature rich, premium-seeking version of its Fusion razor.  Blade edges so fine you need a microscope to see them.  Anti-hydroplane technology.  And an even more ergonomic grip. 

(Wait.  Backup.  My razor blade can hydroplane? On my face?  Scary… Does my auto insurance cover that?)

In contrast, the neighboring article details GE’s plans to launch a handheld ultrasound device.  Price point: under US$10,000.  Compare that to $25-50k for laptop-based machines, or $250k for a cart-based ultrasound.  Of course, the handhelds won’t have the functionality of the others, but for many situations, they don’t need to.  Cutting out features in favor of portability and low price actually opens up new markets.  That’s smart, “good enough” innovation in a tough economic environment.

Needless to say, perhaps, but the feature enhancing variety of innovation is a tough row to hoe in a recession.  With all great respect due to the Gillette brand—for decades an innovator and real enricher of daily shaving activity, including my own—at some point, consumers will declare the emperor naked. 

You can purchase 13 Schick QuattroPro cartridges (a four-bladed monster) for $19.99.  That’s more than enough shaving chops for me.  Compare that to 14 Gillette Fusion Power, five-bladed cartridges for $41.49.  Is the Fusion Power shave a better one?  Perhaps.  But not detectably so for me, and I’m guessing most consumers would say the same, if pressed to break out of their purchasing habits.

Surely, social media will accelerate this emperor de-shrouding.  How long before some clever razor blade upstart equips its socially active advocates to lay bare the math, and make the quadblade the sharp choice on a tight budget?

If you haven’t put your innovation strategy under the microscope to spot the keen edges, its worth doing.  Are you cutting against the economic grain, or shaving with it?

MLC Members, join us for breakfast on May 13^th in San Francisco.  Schwab will host a morning roundtable for MLC members to discuss innovation.  Email Kelly Shattuck if you’d like to pre-register (kshattuck@executiveboard.com).

Also, see some of our favorite innovation case studies:

• How Motorola does 360-degree customer needs mapping
• How BT fosters employee participation in innovation
• How Eli Lilly fosters a common employee understanding of what great insight looks like

• Circuit City still had stores last year at this time
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened the year at 8776 and currently resides at 10497 after a nose-dive to near 6500
• Dubai went from filthy-rich monument of opulence to debt-ridden monument of opulence
• TARP transformed from economy-saving crisis relief to four-letter word that Citi and Bank of America can’t shed fast enough

These events and others sent our marketing executives on an emotional roller coaster that won’t soon be emulated.  Let’s play emotion-by-quarter.  Q1, scared.  Consumer demand plummeted, banks still teetered precariously.  Q2, uncertain.  Job losses mounted, spending retracted further, but the cliff’s edge didn’t seem quite so close.  Q3, ambivalent.  Everyone hoped for the turnaround, but no one had complete confidence it would come.  Today, encouraged (even hopeful, perhaps).

Back to the clichéd learning-from-the-past bit.  If ever there was a lesson that said so much yet gave so little guidance, it applies to 2009 as we look to 2010: expect the unexpected.  By no means will 2010 be easy for marketers.  Consumers have more control over your brand through social media at the same time companies need to define it to achieve growth.  Businesses will continue to haggle on price at the same time unique benefits rule the day.  Major legislation sits before Congress to transform sectors of our economy from health care to energy, with potentially long-lasting effects.  Buck up, my friends.  Another wild ride is coming.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover.

There are two bigger questions here, though. First, are our marketing communications teams equipped to fast-cycle changes to the touchpoint mix as quickly as consumer media consumption shifts? Second, can the NFL or MLB move these fans from a statistical, recessionary blip to long-term loyalty?

As my colleague Pat explored in a previous post, social media is upending our traditional touchpoint planning models. Rapid change to consumer behavior adds another monkey wrench to the tumult social media has created. With more control over media consumption than ever before, consumers’ behavioral shifts – like the mass movement to TV for the NFL – place an even heavier burden on marketers to move dollars quickly to maximize touchpoint value. Think about it – the millions now watching NFL for three hours on a Sunday afternoon are now not doing something else.

Marketers need to harness these consumer changes and make them permanent. The only way we’re going to do that is to establish higher-order, emotional connections with consumers, accelerating loyalty before the next wave of change hits. Because let’s be honest – another Giants loss or two, yard work might start to look attractive again.

MLC members, access our resources on building loyalty with your consumers by developing a shared value, the higher-order emotional connection shared by your brand and the consumer.

Paramount first premiered the movie at a number of midnight screenings on Sept. 25^th, positioning the film as a one-time event not to be missed.  Paramount then capitalized on the strong positive buzz that came from these screenings by deploying a “street team” to promote the movie on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.   Posts encouraged other users to demand the film come to their home town on Eventful.com.  If users demanded the film one million times, Paramount would distribute the film nationally.  Even though national distribution was already part of Paramount’s plan, the ‘demand it’ strategy created greater interest in the film by actively engaging consumers in the distribution process.  Also, it provided fans of the film with the opportunity to serve as lead advocates and encourage friends and family to demand the film as well.

Paramount’s use of social media here is pretty refreshing.  Too often, studios spend millions of dollars on expensive TV and print advertising campaigns to drive up first weekend box office grosses, yet the ads do little to really engage the consumer.  Paramount’s lower cost approach allows it to put the movie into markets where it is likely to succeed (based on the areas where it has been most frequently demanded) while continuing to build demand in other markets by giving consumers a stake in its release, thus leading to better box office results than those typical of a horror film.  Of course, the success of such an initiative relies heavily on the quality of the film—a bad movie would be unlikely to capitalize on word of mouth effectively.

MLC members can click here for more information on driving word-of-mouth through social networks.

While this approach will always be core to our business, we also realize that the times they are a-changin’ and there are a number of other ways for us to more frequently connect with people as passionate about marketing as we are.  Enter Wide Angle, a blog where we’ll share unique and innovative perspectives to paint a broader picture of what’s going on in the world of marketing and within our member network.

How does our blog work?  We’ve organized our content into four sections to help you narrow in on the topics you care about most.

• We are in constant contact with the marketing teams at many Fortune 500 firms, so we have a pretty good sense of what leading marketers are saying and the issues they’re facing on a regular basis.  From the Road will provide an inside view on these conversations and our thoughts.
• Our Cornerstones section will reflect issues at the heart of Big M Marketing.  We’ll cover branding, product management, how to get a better understanding of your customers … basic hygiene issues critical to most every marketer.
• In MarketPulse, we’ll keep you abreast of pressing trends—think green marketing or changes in customer behavior.  This will be our chance to share strategies for coping with the downturn or ways to get ahead as customers’ fortunes turn.
• What does it mean to yammer?  How are companies using neural marketing?  What do I need to know about Web 2.0?  Check out Cutting Edge, where you’ll get the insider’s view on frontier practices as well as our take on the latest buzz sweeping the marketing world.

Wide Angle is our chance to connect with you on a more regular—and informal—basis.  We’re excited to begin the conversation and hope you’ll chime in with thoughts and comments along the way.