Think. Story. Experience.

The biro

I've just come back from three weeks overseas (hence the new Tumi bag referenced in my last post). On my travels I came across a number of things I want to capture in the blog over the next couple of weeks. Perhaps most striking was something I found at Heathrow's new Terminal 5. A biro.

Terminal 5 opened earlier this year. Designed by Richard Rogers, it represented Europe's largest construction project, with a budget of over four billion pounds and a capacity of over 25 million passengers per year. It has a single resident airline, British Airways, and is in every way therefore a flagship for Britain.

Its opening weeks were chaotic, with thousands of passengers delayed and bags lost. But slowly Terminal Five got its act together. Or at least I thought it had, until I came across the biro... 

In front of passport control stood a line of desks, allowing passengers to fill out their immigration cards. And on the desks were biros. A mismatched bunch of disposable pens of different colours and designs, all tethered to the desks by ratty pieces of string.

Here I was in a four billion pound new terminal, the proud gateway to Britain. And this is modern Britain remember, no longer the dated laughing stock of Europe, but now the dynamic home of some of the world's greatest architects and designers. But the best Terminal 5 could offer its millions of arriving passengers were biros on string.

A small thing, but an extraordinary one. Because every touch point matters. And that's the key to great brand experiences, not just getting the big stuff right but the small stuff too (which is so often the stuff that has the most impact because it's the stuff most brands fail to focus on).

And, remember, this was a brand experience. Not only for Terminal 5 and its sole tenant British Airlines, but for Britain too. Because countries are brands, and sloppy attention to detail and poor quality control was part of the old British brand for far too long.

Now I'm not saying that a beautiful piece of desk or pen design would alone make or break the British brand. But in a four-billion-pound budget there would surely have been enough room to fund some aspiring young design students to create custom pieces fit for the purpose. A small thing but with a potentially big impact. Not unlike the biro in fact, just better.

Do lose your receipt

I recently got hold of my first piece of Tumi luggage, having long admired the brand. Tumi has been a classic prestige-product-based success story, built through advocacy, reputation, and status (certainly, I can't recall seeing many ads for Tumi in my time).

In recent years, the Tumi brand has also been driven on by something that is becoming a growing trend for many luxury brands, the proprietary brand store (Tumi opened its first brand store in 1997 in California and that had grown to over fifty stores worldwide by 2008). From Nespresso to Mont Blanc to Omega to Apple, more and more brands are evolving their retail models to reflect a growing desire by premium shoppers to browse and purchase goods in high-quality, brand-monogamous, service-orientated, and experientially-rewarding environments. It's something I want to spend more time reflecting on in future posts.

For now, I want to get back to the Tumi 'difference', because for a brand so committed to creating exceptional products backed by exceptional service, there is something so frustratingly ordinary about part of the service I received (and, perhaps more frustratingly, so simple  to fix).

Tumi offer a five-year worldwide guarantee on their products. Great. And they even offer a worldwide tracking system for lost Tumi bags, based on a unique code stitched into every bag they make. Fantastic. And yet the boundary-free, globally-connected support they offer still relies on the most insanely outdated concept. As the shop assistant who sold the bag said to me, "Make sure you don't lose your receipt". 

It reminded me of the time, many years ago, when an electronics retailer in the UK managed to sell me a three-year extended warranty on the item I had just purchased, before warning me that they kept no record of the warranties they sold so I mustn't lose the receipt it was printed on. At the time I was a student, and therefore deeply unreliable and disorganised. I guess their profit model was based on the likelihood of people like me losing our receipts!

But why is it still that, in an age when service levels and customer experiences (not hard products)  are increasingly the drivers of brand differentiation, so few companies recognise that keeping hold of a paper receipt is a ridiculous and frustrating way to offer long-term support to their customers? Apart from the odd exception (like my car and my hi-fi separates), I can't think of many items I own that don't require a proof of purchase if they go wrong and need fixing.

Surely more and more brands (both manufacturers and retailers) want to create ongoing, personal relationships with their customers? If they don't, they should. And what better way to do it than replacing the easily-lost paper receipt with immediate and electronic customer registration, not just to capture data but to add genuine value to the long-term customer experience?

And, while we're at it, given that I now use a PIN number with my credit card and don't need to sign anything, why are retailers' credit card machines still using the paper, ink, and energy necessary to print out two copies of every credit card receipt? There has to be a simple paper-free alternative, but I guess that's also a topic for another post.

For now, let's just agree that smart brands should be encouraging all of us to lose our receipts.

Seth said it first (and better)

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin's thinking.

And I just spotted that Seth already made the point I covered in my first blog post.

He just said it rather better than I did.

See Seth's take on launch PR...

Just do it

Blog post number one. It's a scarily blank page. And I don't have anything in particular to write or say. Hmm.

Haruki Murakami's new book 'What I talk about when I talk about running' is a memoir. Early on in the book he recalls the time he decided to become a writer...

"I never had any ambition to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I'd find convincing."

Seems like a decent reason to start a blog too. A general desire to write one without any concrete image of what it will be about. Which brings me to the moral of my first blog post. Just do it.

Nike has been urging people for years to "just do it", and it's a message which has equal relevance to organisations, from consumer brands to political parties.

Most organisations are addicted to announcing things. Worse still, they often only do things in order to talk about them. And, worst of all, having announced and talked about something, the act of doing it becomes a token second thought. It's the corrosive habit of press releases, photo opportunities, stunts, initiatives, advertising, and spin. And smart organisations are realising that it no longer works.

We live in a 'new' world these days. People are so connected, so media overloaded, and so hungry for authenticity that they respond to and reward a very different kind of behaviour. This is a world where actions and experiences definitely speak louder than words. Which, funnily enough, is sort of like the old days, before the advent of the mass media and mass advertising.

So, anyway, this blog may be a success. Or it may not. And there's only one way to find out. Just doing it.