I’m staying a few days in Tokyo to speak at ad:tech about Social Media Tracking and ROI. It’s my first time in Tokyo, and when I arrived at my room last night I found this note:

“We are working toward protecting environment and energy saving pertaining to the ecological problems. If you feel unnecessary to have your room cleaned and linen, towels and amenities replaced everyday, please request Non-Cleaning service. In exchange, you will receive the coupon which could be used in the restaurant and hotel shop. Coupon will be issued per day of non-cleaning as follows; ¥1,000 per coupon.”

Basically, I get around $12 in exchange for not cleaning my room. I’ve seen in many hotels rooms around the world the offer not to clean towels/linens because, face it, who needs to get his hotel cleaned room each and every day unless you live the Keith Richards lifestyle? I have 6 towels, 2 beds, my room doesn’t look like an episode of “Hoarders” after one day – not cleaning my room every day seems perfectly reasonable to me. With the exception of the Tokyo hotel, nobody has offered anything in exchange for not cleaning my room. All I got were glossy flyers or brochures, talking about the hotel’s commitment to environment. We all know what’s really behind their green mindset: Cost savings. It costs money to clean towels/linens. It takes a maid at least 30 minutes to clean a room. Skipping one day is a nice way of saving a buck.

But this hotel didn’t bother with a glossy brochure (it’s a rather sad piece of paper). Instead, they offered me real value. $12 I can use to buy my kid a little present, to have a tea and pastry. This little offer for a mutual value exchange left me impressed. They applied the thinking of Behavioral Economics to save themselves money, delighted me, and helped the environment at the same time.

Just imagine airlines would have used the toolbox of Behavioral Economics to get out from under. Reward people not to check too much luggage, offer financial incentives to cut down on carry-on luggage and amenities on board. Give people choices, not just cut, cut, cut – until you make record profits.

Sure, sometimes competitive pressure is so tough that you need cut amenities/services and/or increase costs. We are all adults here. But, how do you think all of us airline passengers feel about record profits for airlines after being treated like a herd of cattle  through a 6-hour flight from Boston to LAX?

Here’s an idea: What if companies made some of their costs transparent to people? You can’t disclose everything, your competitor might eat your for lunch if you disclose your exact profit margins. Just keep it to certain prices that fluctuate constantly. Explain that keeping blankets on board costs you that much money and you give people options to keep those blankets for a price or you will eliminate them. Communicate that fuel prices have increased by 40% (I’m making these numbers up) but tickets prices have remained the same.

Basically, don’t just tell people that you’re going to eliminate blankets and good luck. Communicate your challenges to the public. Integrate your pricing strategy into your overall communication plan. People won’t get that angry when you hike the prices because most of us are adults. We just don’t like to be treated like children. Oh, and the glossy brochure stuff really doesn’t work anymore.

The Customer Experience Impact 2010 report just came out and the numbers are frightening for brands with mediocre or bad customer service:

• 82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience
• 95% said they would “take action” after a bad customer experience
• 79% of U.S. consumers shared their negative customer experience in public and amongst friends
• 58% of consumers who took their complaints to Facebook/Twitter expected a response from the company, 42% within a day
• 55% became a customer of a company because of their reputation for good customer service
• 55% would pay 10% more for a good customer experience

The “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore” attitude of people has transformed into “I’m mad as hell, and I will take my business somewhere else”. These are staggering numbers. It’s budgeting season for many companies right now and this report should encourage brands to have another hard look at their budgets: Until your customer service system is close to perfect, does it really make sense to invest that much into marketing/advertising? Aren’t you patching holes while new holes are popping up each and every day, one disgruntled customer at a time?

And, brands should not regard social platforms as the secret bullet. As Techcrunch reports, the demand for human interaction has actually increased:

“In 2007, 60% of consumers said when they had a negative customer experience, they wanted to speak to a live agent about it. At that time, 26% preferred email, 5% chat, but Facebook and Twitter weren’t used by corporations to handle complaints and resolve problems. This year, 83% of U.S. consumers said they wanted to speak to a live agent, 66% preferred email, 12% chat, and 7% choose social networking sites when trying to resolve a problem.”

A mindset change is needed: Regard Customer Service as an investment, not a cost. In the end, customer service is sales.

You can download the full report here.

Image: Courtesy of 25.media.tumblr

It’s tragic but true: Seduction is never easy when you’re seducing someone you actually like. When we fall in love with someone, we see them in the light of perfection. When we seduce a person we don’t really like, we put on the seduction mask, and desire to elicit a sense of inferiority.

Over the decades, most companies have shown all of us that they really don’t like people. They try to push them away with phone trees, form letters, and bureaucracy. People perceived to be inferior and felt the need to lie or take on a different persona to deal with companies. A soft-spoken person can turn into a raging tyrant after 20 minutes on hold.

With the advent of social technologies, people feel they regained some of their power back and that makes it harder for brands to seduce. Resulting in an emerging demand for transparency. People want to understand what companies are standing for, they want to share values. Ultimately, they want companies to love them and see them as equals. Not as inferior targets.

Too many brands are still using the seduction formula. Since seduction is a form of acting, brands need to have a concept of the audience’s expectations, understand what people will want to hear. The age-old problem with seduction aka advertising is that brands often don’t know what the audience will actually be touched by. More often than not, we guess why people fall in love with us. And brands are as clueless. It might be time for brands to put away the seduction masks and use the ultimate trick: be yourself.

Throughout the World Cup, I received many emails and tweets congratulating “my team”, Deutschland, for their great tournament and playing really exciting soccer (Fussball, as I call it.). Reading German newspapers and magazines, I experienced a lot of self-congratulation for the new, exciting German soccer game, how suddenly the world loves Germans and the multi-cultural faces that played on the team. Oh yes, and 3rd place was lovely.

Enough already.

We’re talking German soccer here. We’re supposed to win each time. Sure, we won’t, but any tournament we don’t win is a loss. Period. Did you ever see the Lakers or Yankees fans celebrate a second place? Or a good loss in the Division Final? Of course not. On paper, Germany’s performance in the last 3 tournaments looks outstanding: Third place World Cup 2006, 2nd place Euro 2008 and 3rd place World Cup 2010. Great. But, where’s the trophy?

Match it up with all that nonsense talk when the US tied England in a group game and people started to celebrate it as a victory. That kind of talk will get you nowhere. Very, very quickly.

Winning organizations are like “A” students: They expect to get an “A” each time they perform. Whenever they get a “B” or worse, they’re disappointed and work hard to get back to the “A” level. Mediocre organizations are like “C” students: They get a “B-” and high-five each person they encounter. They are still not as good as the slip-up of the “A” organization but they’re ecstatic because for once they’re out of the “C” cellar. Just to slip back into it again very, very soon.

We all worked with “A” people before. They might fail, maybe even often, but they always give everything they have. They believe something can be done when others think it can’t. They can solve problems others consider unsolvable. They don’t believe in expectation of others, they have their own expectations. And, we all worked with “C” people. They might talk a big game but their actual work is sloppy. Mistakes. Not failures. Laziness. No high standards. No inner push.

If your organization does things that everyone arounds you thinks you can achieve, then your organization is just a “B” student, not pushing everyone hard enough. I’m not talking about pipe dreams, I’m talking about Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Rationally, you will achieve your goals when you meet certain metrics. But, that’s not fulfilling, organizational achievement. Real accomplishment and achievement comes from pushing everyone, including yourself, to the limit. Beyond the place where everybody else thinks you could ever go. As a “C” organization, you need to push for constant “A” scores. It might take a while,  a lot of “B” scores, but as long you keep up an air of excellence, deeply rooted in your organization, you are on the way to become an “A” organization.

An interesting thing happens on the way: The people that didn’t believe in you and your organization in the beginning, will be starting to believe in you. And these people will do everything they can to make you even more successful. Nothing in your balance sheet might have changed, you still employ the same people, deal with the same stakeholders – a mindset of excellence will change everything.

My kid’s Karate teacher said to the class a few days ago: ” When you want to tear a piece of paper with your hand, you don’t aim for the paper. You don’t aim for a small space behind the paper. You aim for a place 2,000 miles beyond the paper.”

Shoot for the stars.