Tales of Delight

The fifth annual Love @ First Website in Portland was a rousing success thanks to a delightful group of speakers.

Zipcar, Columbia Sportswear and Big Deal PR talked to a room full of marketers about how to deliver delight.

ISITE Design team members came back to the office with some nuggets of wisdom.

Local Culture Matters

Melissa Casburn

Local culture matters, as exemplified by Zipcar's decision to pay the dreaded zone toll for its London drivers. While it can be tempting to roll out a global business model in the name of efficiency, solutions that don't take local custom, attitude, and perception into effect are liable to be woefully ineffective. Delight, in particular, is difficult to deliver in a pre-packaged, onesize-fits-all format.

Take time to learn about your customers, about what problems you can help them solve and what makes them feel appreciated. Go hyper-local and see how North Chicago differs from South Chicago. Go beyond the mass demographics: instead of designing for "Men, 24 to 44 years old", do it for "Ted, a newly married carpenter from Teaneck". Make a random customer happy every day.

Think like a customer

Patrick Craig

Both Zipcar and Columbia offered good reminders to think like a customer when approaching a web strategy. Zipcar responds to its customer needs by actively engaging on Twitter. Columbia's "A Box Life" campaign could have not been possible without listening to customer feedback. From my perspective as a designer, unless you actively work at it, it can be easy to forget who you are designing for and why. I’m most successful when I can look at the design work through the eyes of an end user.

Marketing return on investment

Andrew McLaughlin

Paul Zaengle showed a comparison of the online marketing and merchandising activities at Columbia. He created a chart that maps how often the activity is being used (scale of 0-100% on the x axis) to the overall effectiveness of that activity (scale of 0-100% on y axis).

Each activity is then illustrated as a bubble showing the financial investment Columbia makes for each. The result is a picture showing which activities have the most value at the lowest cost. From my perspective, this helped illustrate the daily challenge our customers face in deciding how to prioritize their investment in the web channel. Paul’s framework can help bring clarity to this process and give organizations a benchmark to compare the longer term cost-benefit trends.

Turning frowns upside down

Matthew Clarke

The speakers reminded me that 'listening' to customers is about a lot more than just implementing Social Media doohickeys. It’s a cultural shift for an organization.

Zipcar operates with the belief that a bad customer experience can almost always be turned into a positive brand experience with the right response. They do this by listening and responding with something unique and custom tailored to the needs of its customers.

The secret to awesomeness and innovation

Will Moore

“Dedicating time to innovation leads to innovation”
- Columbia Sportswear

“It's easy to be awesome: just be awesome”
- Zipcar

Humanizing the brand

Sheryl Hampton

Columbia’s "A Box Life" initiative allows customers to have their product purchases shipped to them in recycled boxes. These boxes are labeled and their journey across the country/world can be recorded online by each recipient.

Share the eco-love and send it on to someone else. Upload pictures along the way and have the community tell the ongoing travel journal of the box. A couple of aspects of this initiative resonated with me, beyond responding to customers’ concerns of so much cardboard waste:

• The idea of humanizing something as mundane as a cardboard box is brilliant. Take a look at some of the pictures on the site; these are people interacting with the boxes.
• Columbia Sportswear fosters a corporate culture of innovation, supporting a framework and structure for great ideas to bubble up – the idea for this program came from a Columbia employee; of course this is a smart business philosophy.
• The branding was smart too – it’s not overtly Columbia, just “sponsored by”. Huge from the standpoint of brand association, without being blatantly showy.

The kicker to this is that the majority of Columbia’s online customers purposefully opt-in to the recycled boxes. What a huge win all around.