Loyalty and the absence of thought

Seth Godin is making a whole lot of sense. It all started when I began reading up on his daily thoughts. Seth of course has been making sensible literature for many years now as a marketing genius badly needed in our time.

Well, I've most certainly read enough! And I... will finally help myself with a little inspiration from Seth's recent piece, Two kinds of loyalty.

The first kind of loyalty is the loyalty of convenience.

I'm going to look around, sure, but probably won't switch. Switching is risky, it's time consuming. Switching means a new account manager or moving my software or reprinting something. Switching means I might make a mistake or lose my miles or have to defend a new decision.

Corporations are getting ever better at building this sort of loyalty.

Whenever I look at enterprise software, an always perplexing thing is how they make it excruciatingly difficult to leave you. Whatever happened to getting customers to stay because you have the best means to deliver the demands of the present--and the great promise of the future?

Our biggest reason for staying with software makers who obviously forgot this simple truth has, lately, become the worst kind of logic. We can't leave because we fear for business continuity. And the cause of this guilt is because, apparently, our vendor didn't think about how you'll survive without them. But hey, they did think about it. That's why it's too difficult. And I say this as bluntly as I can. They made it so to "make" you loyal.

The problem with the loyalty of convenience is that the customer is always tempted to look and look some more, and the vendor is always working to build barriers, barriers that don't necessarily increase satisfaction, but merely build a wall of hassle around the (now) trapped customer.

We don't have a common marketing term for this sort of feeling, but 'stuck' comes to mind.

Seth is right. The loyalty of convenience exists indeed. And a good amount of the largest software makers globally are very good at such rampant customer betrayal. Building a "wall of hassle" to make your switch harder instead of focusing on building great user experiences is just plain ridiculous. It's almost like bondage. Talk about being candid.

Then there's the other kind of loyalty. This is the loyalty of, "I'm not even looking."

This is the loyalty of, "I'm the kind of person that sticks with people who stick with me." This is the loyalty of someone who doesn't even want to know that there's a better deal somewhere else, because, after all, he's in it for the long haul.

This second type of loyalty is where everyone ought to be. No one's interested in finding something else because the need just doesn't pop out. There's no sense in entertaining anything else because what you have meets everything you could possibly ask for.

Everything works and everyone's happy. It keeps improving whether or not customers are asking for anything new. And best of all, leave whenever you wish without the fear of not being able to bring your data with you.

The beauty of the second kind of loyalty, the loyalty of identity and satisfaction, is that the person who isn't even looking is committed, as committed to the relationship as the vendor is. You earn this sort of loyalty, you don't architect it.

You can only focus on creating one sort of loyalty at a time, true?

One of the things that has greatly enabled Loyalty #2 is the cloud. With it, you pay for only what you use, plus the freedom to stop any time. But not all clouds are created equal I'm afraid. Some of them are on the cloud but still do things in the same, unflinching way. It's absolutely horrid.

So how do you know which solutions are doing this to you? I'm not going to feed you cryptic things like "you don't find it, it finds you." Instead, follow the same logic Seth started. Are you starting to find frustration in what your company is using? Are your end users starting to demand better means to do things? Are you so deeply entrenched with what you have that the very thought of transitioning out is a nightmare in itself?

Then there you go. Start planning your way out and find solutions that are open for postmortem scenarios. But let me add more than that. Something totally off my wavelength. But hey, if this means getting through everyone, what the hell--

If someone loves you for real, they'll let you go. If you stay regardless, then it's mutual love.

Damn it, my blog will never be the same!

:)

Let there be iPhone

Today's piece is an insight from a very interesting article I came across in The New York Times written by Fred Vogelstein.

It recounts the inhuman toil of the team that produced the original iPhone in 2007. The person behind the tale is Andy Grignon, in charge of iPhone's internal radios during the time. Apple's smartphone market debut would be Steve's most important product since the original Macintosh. (Current annual revenues of the iPhone alone is larger than all of Microsoft's businesses combined.)

The massive effort that brought together the best engineers and designers in one highly secretive team can simply be described as phenomenal. Everyone who got offered a role pretty much accepted chronic sleeplessness, unnerving paranoia, and Steve's occasional cruel slander. All for a shot of greatness. They didn't even know what they were building at first!

And this presents in itself a predicament for us to ponder.

There is no debate that insane hard work is the most potent ingredient to perform the greatest magic. However, doing so will suck the life out of you. The iPhone team literally killed themselves to meet Steve's most fanatical demands. Then again, Apple had a solemn promise in return for all the hard sacrifice: Untold glory awaits those who will endure. But you have got to be brilliant the entire time or you're out.

Will you accept endless suffering if it meant taking part in the most promising magic trick yet?

Well, someone has to force everyone to drink when it's all over.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.” And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

Scotch? Exactly.