Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

JetBlue Shows How an FoE Manages a Customer Crisis

Several people have asked me about how I think JetBlue has managed last week's weather-related fiasco that left thousands stranded and some passengers on the tarmac at New York’s JFK airport for 11 hours. JetBlue is one of the exemplars of stakeholder relationship management (SRM) cited in our book, Firms of Endearment.

Here’s what how I answered one person:

Neeleman has approached this crisis with candor, humility, empathy and convincing resolve to never have last week's disaster repeated. In my judgment, he has acted quintessentially as an FoE CEO.

Amazingly, the Street has apparently been charmed by Neeleman's down-to-earth manner in communicating with JetBlue customers. My money is still on JetBlue having a good year -- a 12%% - 15% rise over today's stock price by year-end despite the earning hit last week's events caused.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post carried a full-page letter addressed to JetBlue’s customers. It began, “We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all we're deeply sorry." Later on the letter reads, "... JetBlue was founded on the premise of bringing humanity back to air travel... We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week." You can read the full apology here.

Compare Neeleman’s approach with that of Delta, which also had weather-related delays. MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough sat in center seat on an Atlanta-bound flight from LaGuardia for nine hours. As reported in this week’s issue of Advertising Age, Scarborough complained that he had yet to get an apology from the company. “… instead, I’m getting spin from a company that’s refusing to take responsibility for one bad decision after another.

Meanwhile, David Neeleman has not only apologized profusely, he has drawn up and issued a Customers’ Bill of Rights which you can download from here. The Customer Bill of Rights is a classic FoE-type response to a major problem. JetBlue is now the first company that will compensate customers for protracted delays. In one of the most astonishing provisions, JetBlue will pay any passenger who gets bumped because of overbooking $1,000.

We are fully confident that JetBlue will be enthusiastically welcomed back into the hearts of many customers’ and cheered by those who never lost faith in JetBlue in the first place.

DBW

This article was also posted at Amazon.com  and at the Firms of Endearment blog.

Self-Expression: The Continuous Re-creation of Self

Self-expression is a morally broad term. During the 1960s and 1970s we saw episodic orgies in hedonistic self-expression. “If it feels good, then it is good” was a celebratory mantra of the times.

Today, the ethos underlying the concept of self-expression reflects a less self-indulgent quality than we saw in the Age of the Flower Child, which promoted anything but childhood values.

The rapid aging of the population throughout the developed nations of the world, with a little over a billion people, is transforming self-expression from neotenous self-indulgent behavior toward self-actualization behavior for tens of millions who have reached the second half of life.

The old – and the nearly – are good for society. They temper the hormonally driven behavior of youth. Having evolved beyond juvenile self-absorption they have a more others’ centered connection with the world. This is a core tenet of the increasingly famous “grandmother hypothesis” first proposed by University of Utah evolutionary psychologist Kristen Hawkes.

Hawkes believes that Homo sapiens outlasted Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon in large part because of a sharp increase in post-menopausal women around 30,000 years ago as a result of a sudden spurt in human longevity. This blossoming of the prehistoric elderly population promoted the development of oral history. Even today, older people are the biggest consumers of history as every historical destination knows.

With the development of oral history, lessons learned by one generation were likelier to end up in the minds of following generations. I presume that grandmothers of the day, like grandmothers today, sought to extend their own influence beyond the boundaries of time by having their values and life lessons survive them. And granddads must also have felt that way, much as today’s granddads commonly reach out to give back, thus leaving markers of their existence and proof of their value as human beings.

So, self-expression among people in the second half of life is often more about the next generation than simple self-indulgence.

Self-expression takes many forms. Its range of manifestation extends from artistic expression to taking an innovative approach to help the homeless. It is about giving response to the libido as Jung defined it.

To Freud, the libido was the mere drive for sex that accounted for most unconscious motivation.  Jung believed the libido was much more than this.  For him the libido was a force that flows through and energizes the unconscious in many ways, sometimes sexual, sometimes hunger, and sometimes the simple will to survive. To Jung, the libido was about the operation of the principle of conatus – the disposition of every organism to recreate itself at ever-higher levels of development.

In the first half of life, especially during and after adolescence, the imperative for self-expression is strongly rooted in the cause of biological re-creation of the self. In the second half of life, the self-expression imperative takes on a more nonmaterial or metaphysical bent and more likely results in activities that benefit others, including the human species itself.

Think of Bill and Melinda Gates. They’ve secured their biological re-creation of self, and now are moving into a full-time life of serving all of humankind in their efforts to wipe out malaria, extinguish AIDs and immensely reduce poverty through improvements in education.

I’ll continue this discussion in my next post. In the meantime, I hope you have been able to follow this meandering thread that began with my wife’s ikebana class last week (see previous post.)

__________________

By the way, the increasingly famous Dove campaign is very much about self-expression. It begins with the idea of giving young girls and women of all ages greater confidence in being who they are and expressing themselves through an authentic projection of self.

For a new video and other representations of this remarkable campaign, which includes a different look at aging, go to http://doveproage.com . Ironically, though Dove sells anti-aging products it does so from a pro-aging platform.

Ikebana and an Epochal Change in the Contemporary Japanese Zeitgeist

My wife Linda is an ikebana artiste. She’s modest about her work, but to me she’s quite accomplished. She takes my praises gracefully but insists that because she has been in the presence of real masters, she is but a neophyte.

But let me tell you, when I walk into our dining room and see a new ikebana arrangement it does something to and for me. In our entry hall we have a charming little sconce that she sets with a miniature ikebana that never fails stop me for a moment of quiet reflection when I see it for the first time. Ascend the staircase and be greeted by a dramatic arrangement that when first seen can take your breath away.

Ikebana is a style of Japanese flower arranging that emphasizes the linear aspects of the arrangement. Westerner flower arrangements generally emphasize the quantity and colors of the flowers. They strive to focus a viewer’s attention on the beauty of the blossoms. Ikebana is more holistic. The art includes the vase, stems, leaves, and branches, as well as the flowers.

The ikebana style of flower arranging originated in Buddhist temple in the 6^th century AD. The entire structure of a Japanese ikebana flower arrangement is based on three main points that symbolize heaven, earth, and humankind.

Last Saturday, over dinner in our favorite Indian restaurant (we’re ethnic foodies to the nth degree), Linda shared with me an insight that startled me. She is a practitioner of the Sogetsu School of ikebana. That day she had a lesson from a Sogetsu master. He told the class that ikebana used to be about rigorously following a detailed system of rules. Now, however, “it’s more about self-expression than it once was.”

Self-expression is a foremost feature in the contemporary zeitgeist – worldwide.

Zeitgeist is a powerful force in consumer behavior. It influences the worldviews, values, aspirations, and lifestyles of people at virtually all ages. Zeitgeist is originally a German expression meaning "the spirit (geist) of the time (zeit)." It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era.

Despite its substantial influence on human behavior, zeitgeist gets relatively little attention in marketing. To the degree it does, it tends to be regarded superficially.

The concept of “cohort effect” gets considerably more attention. It is indeed valuable to know about factors that help to an age cohort define in behavioral terms. However, zeitgeist effects – fields of influence that go toward defining an entire culture– influence cohort effects.

When Linda told me of the shift of ikebana philosophy to foster self-expression, I saw it as a cultural phenomenon that is connected to the recent tectonic change in the worldwide zeitgeist that has fostered increased subjectivity in people’s worldviews.

Worldviews, we should take note of, is not about what people believe, but how they connect to the world. For example, teens connect to the world differently than young adults, and differences exist between younger and older adults in how they connect to the world. 

In the past, the zeitgeist fostered stronger objectivity in how people generally connected to the world. Others set down the social rules underlying the culture that guided the individual’s behavior. Self-expression was kept tightly reigned in. No culture was more elaborately insistent on keeping a damper on self-expression than the Japanese. Despotic regimes always do this, but not with the complexity of protocols the Japanese kept in place.

But even in Japan, now, self-expression is increasingly changing the Japanese zeitgeist. As in every other developed nation, marketers in Japan must now change their marketing worldview – that is, how they connect to the consumer.

I’ll continue this discussion in my next post.

 

This IS the Day!

Today IS the day!

This is the day of the formal release of Firms of Endearment, of which I am co-author. This book is surely one of the most satisfying accomplishments of my long career. My co-author Raj Sisodia was a big reason for the great satisfaction I’ve experienced in working on this book. Raj is Trustee Professor at Bentley College, located just outside of Boston in Lexington.

Among my memories that I will treasure till my last breath are the writing retreats we took. Raj, being Indian, did most of the cooking. He is as fine a chef as he is an intellectual. I can’t wait to get to work on our next book!

Let me share with you how Wharton School Publishing describes the background for this book in the first paragraph on the front cover flap:

“We’re entering an Age of Transcendence, as people increasingly search for higher meaning in their lives, not just possessions. This is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, the very soul of capitalism. Increasingly, today’s most successful companies are bringing love, joy, authenticity, empathy and soulfulness into their businesses; they are delivering emotional, experiential, and social value – not just profits.”

It would be one thing if the publisher of Firms of Endearment were a second tier publisher known for feel-good books. However, Wharton is the first or second-ranked business school in America (depending on whether you’re from Harvard or not, one wag told me). When have any top-ranked incubators of MBAs sponsored talk about “love, joy, authenticity, empathy and soulfulness” in how businesses should be run?

This book is about a major paradigm in the arenas of commercial intercourse. The scale of this paradigm shift is unprecedented in terms of speed of development (within a single generation) and scope (it is global).

A little history can help us appreciate how the theories and philosophy of business are undergoing radical change:

King Magnus Eriksson granted the earliest corporate charter on record to the Stora Kopparberg mining community in Falun, Sweden in 1347. For just under five centuries corporations were chartered by the State for public purposes such as building hospitals, bridges, roads and universities. Generally, corporations undertook tasks deemed too risky or too expensive for individuals or governments to accomplish. The government closely oversaw them, and charters could be revoked if the corporations failed to fulfill their public purpose. Shareholders were beneficiaries, but were not regarded as the primary reason for the company’s existence.

The modern form of corporations traces its origins to an 1844 act in Britain that allowed them to define their own purpose. This largely shifted control of corporations from the government to the courts.

Now, as the 21^st century gets underway, we are seeing a return to the idea that companies have a social as well as a wealth creation purpose to satisfy in order to justify their existence. Firms of Endearment is about this movement and presents such names as Whole Foods, Costco, IKEA, IDEO, Southwest Airlines, Harley-Davidson, New Balance, and JetBlue as exemplars of this new direction.

Firms of Endearment is now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

What's Behind Candy Maker Mars' Pledge to No Longer Market to Kids Under 12

I intermittently participate in an online forum sponsored by Advertising Age called “Soflow.”

Yesterday, a Soflow member reported that candy-maker giant Mars recently announced that it will no longer market to kids younger than 12. He then said, “I can hear the stocks falling now. Is taking the "moral" high ground with respect to a product more desirable than the "bottom line"?

I don’t think Mars’ moral declaration will adversely affect its bottom. In fact, I would not be surprised if they took that action to help the bottom line through a higher topline. I wrote the following response.

A hard truth – a hard one because it works against so many of us in the marketing game – is that to advertise to children as it most typically is done is to exploit them their undeveloped minds. The frontal lobes, which support executive functions (the ability to analyze information, project outcomes, and understand why), are not completely formed until around the age of seven. Even by the middle or late teen age years the brain’s development remains incomplete. Recent research indicates that brain development is not complete until the early 20s.

Teens do not cognitively and emotionally operate on a par with adults. In comparison with adult brains, teen brains are relatively poor in projecting adverse outcomes. This is the source of the youthful sense of invulnerability. While the teen brain does quite well in projecting pleasurable outcomes, it doesn’t do so well in projecting painful outcomes. This is why advertising that associates intense pleasure with a product is not easily overcome by preachments about potentially harmful outcomes in either using the product (say cigarettes) or misusing a product (say candy).

Publicly traded candy makers must grow sales to remain healthy on Wall Street. Therefore they have a strong incentive to rationalize the use of seductive advertising to those who are neuronally ill-equipped to resist it, namely children in this context. To the degree they might accept that kids are not great decision-makers when a candy jar is within reach, they will bail out of responsibility by saying its up to kids’ parents to control what their kids eat.

I do not have a lot of faith in the sincerity of Mars' claim that it will no longer market to kids under 12. In the first place, because kids under 12 are big-time into role models as a part of developing their own identities, one can ostensibly be advertising to older kids or adults and still be reaching the under-12-age group. I think Mars' main objective here is to make parents feel better about the company because it's acting (ostensibly) socially responsible.

All this reminds me of Philip Morris's anti-smoking ads aimed at the under-18. Recent research has indicated these ads (that might make adults feel better about Philip Morris) actually inspire some teens to take smoking. Philip Morris is trying to have it both ways: come off as socially responsible, while continuing to attract new customers under the age of 18.

Full measure of moral rectitude cannot be taken by considering an action outside of itws context. What is the context for Mars' ostensibly moral decision to not market to kids under 12?