What Airline Safety Videos Can Teach us about Changing Customer Behavior.

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Customers taking things for granted is the enemy of all Marketers. How do you get your people to change their behavior and pay attention to your message?

I have recently seen a great example of this in airlines safety videos. If you fly a lot like I do, you probably ignore the safety presentation. Whether it’s the stewardess doing it live in the aisle or playing on the screen, you are likely ignoring it, playing Flappy Bird on your phone (in airplane mode, of course).

That’s because we know what they are going to say or show us. We know how to buckle a seatbelt, how to put on the oxygen mask or use our seat as a flotation device.

The familiarity of the safety video is an excellent example of familiarity in marketing or a customer experience. The good news is that I know what they were trying to communicate in the video. Thebad news is that I completely ignore it now.

This same concept of familiarity applies to marketing. If you have seen the ad or the commercial or website banner enough, you don’t see it anymore. It becomes a familiar image that your brain notices but doesn’t process. That is, until it changes.


Delta made a few funny changes to their safety video:

Now the video is really entertaining, particularly if you remember all these things from the 80s, like I do. But it is also Delta’s way of making sure that their passengers have a little bit better experience. Instead of just ignoring the video like they usually do, they changed it a little bit to make it better for the passengers, so they will notice it again.

My post, “The Yin and Yang of Familiarity in Marketing” talks about the pros and cons of familiarity. On the one hand, it’s familiar so it’s comfortable. Like your favorite chair, it makes you feel safe. On the other hand, familiarity breeds contempt. It’s too predictable and boring, so you don’t always notice the familiar. If you consider this, you can certainly understand why so many marriages fail. It’s because the couple may have just grown bored of each other. Unfortunately, this can happen in your customer experience as well.

So when we advise our clients’ in customer experience design, we tell them they need to spice it up a little to keep their customers’ interest. Stimulate the good emotions in a new way that keeps improving the experience for them. Even little good changes make a customer take notice. If you don’t believe me, try making the experience just a little bit worse and see how much they notice!


One airline that knows how to spice things up and keep it stimulating is Air New Zealand. Consider their new video:

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It’s a regulation that the safety features of the aircraft are explained to passengers before the flight. That’s every single flight…and the same safety features. Both airlines recognize that the safety video is familiar enough to most passengers that they have a little bit of wiggle room to be creative with how they meet this regulation. By changing the familiar, they improve the experience for their passengers. Some videos more than others.

What? I was talking about the 80’s video! Geez!

So when it comes to your customer experience, you need to look for the safety videos in your experience. If your whole experience is as familiar and boring as the typical safety video, it may be time for an overhaul of the whole thing. But if you have an experience that is overall pretty good, maybe you can find a new way to keep it interesting and make it better for your customers.

What are the safety video moments in your experience and how can you use them to make it a little better for your customers? I’d be interested to hear your answers in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in the following blogs:

• The Yin and Yang of Familiarity in Marketing
• Wal-Mart Disappoints Wall Street and Customers Alike
• The Destination Starbucks – A concept customer experience

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below. If you would like to follow Beyond Philosophy click here

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

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5 Stealth Ways to Make Air Travel More Fun

I have flown millions of miles on several airlines, which means some weeks I spend more time in the air than on the ground.

While most of the time I find decent service on my flights, there have been a few trips where ground or flight crews seemed eager to live up to the old airline motto: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

Recently I sat down with my friend Ron Kaufman, who lives in Singapore and may be one of the few people who travels more than me. We brainstormed a few stealth ways to improve your air travel experience. Try these on your next trip and see if they help.

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1. Look for innovations.

Here’s a secret most savvy marketers know: Airports have one of the largest concentrations of high net-worth individuals anywhere. So it makes sense that smart brands use airports to launch their latest ideas. When you get to the airport, keep your eyes peeled for who’s advertising, who’s offering up their new wares.
In London Ron found a hot dog cart selling laptop computers. In Abu Dhabi there’s a vending machine that dispenses gold bars. In Los Angeles I found a place that sells homemade quinoa pepper soup. In New York a candy vendor was selling buckets of peanut butter—yes buckets—and they were moving!
Take a photo of whatever surprises you and share it on social media with friends or colleagues. Finding something new is a like discovering a prize, and it can make the journey less of a chore and more of a scavenger hunt.

2. Be delightful at check-in.

If you check-in with airline customer service at the counter, have your ID ready, start with a genuine smile, and greet the rep using their name. Ask a simple question: “How’s your day going?” or “How did you get the midnight shift?” When the counter people are treated like real human beings they are much more likely to give you a little bit of extra care, make a recommendation on a better seat, suggest a good place for breakfast, or explain how long it will take to get to your gate.

3. Cheer up the crew.

Serving you drinks and keeping you safe in a bumpy cramped metal tube for five hours—for not much money—is a pretty tough job. So naturally we’ve probably all encountered a cabin crew who were so impolite that you wondered who kicked them in the backside on their way to work.
You can help change this for everyone’s benefit. Climb on board with the sole intention to make your cabin crew smile. Look at their nametags right away. Say “Good morning (name).” I’ve seen people bring the flight attendants donuts to make their day, at the very least you can say something nice like, “Thanks for taking us to Toledo today.” A moment of eye contact, a warm smile, and a few kind words will make you stand out from every other bleary-eyed passenger on the flight. You may not get free champagne, but you won’t get a scolding or the hairy-eyeball either.
Kaufman, author of Uplifting Service, carries small “Keep It Up” cards and hands them out to great service providers he meets at curbside, check-in, security, gate, or on board the plane. You can get and use a free digital version at www.UpYourService.com/compliment

4. Talk to your neighbor.

On most flights you are going to sit two inches away from another human being for hours and hours. Where else in your life would you be stuck that close to someone for that long and ignore them? It’s actually normal behavior to introduce yourself and ask if they are going home or heading out, for work or for fun. Inevitably I meet some of the most interesting people on flights. Not long ago I sat by an engineer who was building charging stations for the Tesla electric car. The trip blew by as with great passion he described his work. On another flight I sat next to a Canadian man who was on his way to Israel to play in a senior ice hockey tournament. Who knew they played hockey in Israel?
The point is, everyone has a story. It makes the journey much more interesting if you find those stories. Who knows, you might just make a new friend.

5. Turn travel anger into travel appreciation

Finally we recommend traveling with an attitude of gratitude and a willingness to find the bright side in every awkward, annoying, or frustrating moment. Travel offers plenty of inconveniences—weather or equipment delays that no one tells you about until the last moment; long lines of angry, sometimes smelly people; crying babies or toddlers who kick your seat back; the list goes on. When these problems occur—and they will—catch them with a “There you are!” as if you have been looking for those delays all day and you won a prize.
And we suggest we all change our attitudes to understand that most inconveniences actually are blessings in disguise. Yes, the flight is delayed but the mechanics found that problem with the engine before you were in the air! Yes, that baby is crying behind you but isn’t that better than one that is airsick next to you, or in your lap! Yes, you are getting a TSA search, but you didn’t pack your bomb, so hey, it’s all good!
It’s air travel, so yes you will encounter your fair share of surly service providers, pent-up passengers, and irritating inconveniences. But never forget, you are doing what people for thousands of years have dreamed about—you are flying across the country or between continents in a matter of hours. It is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it! You might not be able to change everything about your trips, but you can change the way you respond to what happens along the way. And that can change everything.
These are a few tips form me and my good friend Ron Kaufman. I’d love to hear what you do to make air travel more fun, or at least a little less annoying.

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Fewer doctors? Innovate medical devices and services""

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Rapid diagnostic tests, digital health technologies and human factors will be key as #MyIndustry combats the shortfall in the US of more than 91,500 physicians by 2020 recentlyhighlighted by the Association of Medical Colleges. This shortfall will affect all primary care and medical specialities; the US are not training enough doctors for its’ growing and aging population. This is not a problem solely confined to the US; growing global populations will make the already acute shortage of physicians in countries including China, India, Nigeria and Indonesia substantially worse. A recent op-ed in The New York Times from Scott Gottlieb andEzekiel Emanuel suggested that the situation in the US could be alleviated by changing the way in which healthcare is delivered.

Digital health technologies including remote patient monitoring and minimally invasive surgerywere two of the areas which were highlighted as being able to ease the demand on physicians. Data analytics will also ease the burden on physicians; this could be through post-marketing evaluation of clinical procedures, medical devices which provide clinical decision support and closed-loop systems such as the artificial pancreas.

There are two linked themes which run through many of the suggestions about changing the way in which healthcare is delivered; simplify the provision of healthcare and empower other healthcare professionals to provide services physicians currently deliver.

The provision of healthcare can be simplified by evaluating the benefits which a treatment is providing and making medical devices which perform more functions and perform them in a more intuitive manner. Developing next-generation medical devices in this manner will require a suite of skills from an understanding of the clinical procedures, to the hardware and software which could be integrated into the device and finally ensuring that the device fits intoexisting workflows.

Empowering healthcare professional to provide services currently delivered by physicians will require additional training and access to clinical decision support tools which can substitute for the role of physician. In addition legislation will need to be changed to permit these healthcare professionals to perform tasks currently only performed by physicians. While this strategy expands the number of people able to delivery healthcare, it also expands the number of people liable for litigation. Medical malpractice currently costs about $55.6 billion in the US alone. It will be intriguing to see how this tightrope is walked over the coming years.

These benefits will only be realised when they are broadly implemented by healthcare providers. Monitoring implementation of changes in healthcare provision can provide multiplebenefits. Systems such as time-driven activity based costing have been championed byMichael Porter and Robert Kaplan. They enable a patients’ journey to be tracked; including monitoring which healthcare professionals provide their healthcare, the equipment which is used and the length of time interactions last. This enables standardisation of protocols and more accurate costings.

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B2B 101: How To Connect With Customer ON-Line""

A great viral video or a commercial during the Super Bowl will turn a brewery into a pop-culture sensation, but your business isn’t so lucky. As a vendor of business-critical technologies and services, your job is to eschew “cool” for intelligence, and that means connecting with customers in a different way. The traditional marketing channels may not bear the same fruit for your B2B business, but these methods will make hay in ways you never thought possible.

Build   A Great  Website

Your website is the gateway to your customers. It’s a first impression, lead generation tool, marketing piece, and sales pitch all in one. With so many hats, a solid B2B business needs a well crafted website in order to build communication with potential customers.

Regardless of the specific aesthetic, layout, or tone involved in your online storefront, a strong business website builds trust. Coherent product descriptions ensure that those searching for an appropriate vendor can make an easy assessment. Contact information makes potential clients feel safe in the knowledge that they can contact your company on a moment’s notice. Finally, landing pages for product offers and demos maximize your conversion rate and reach a broader audience in the process.

Use The Right Social Media Channel

Social media is frequently billed as a “magic bullet” for companies, reaching widespread audiences and building a following while encouraging engagement. While this is true, to an extent, no one can be everything to everyone. Your company, particularly as a B2B enterprise, has a focused clientele, and that clientele exists in a specific place.

Perform your market research and determine where potential clients exist and use target your approach on that basis. LinkedIn, in particular, provides an excellent opportunity to connect with thought leaders, and become one yourself. The professional context and contact breed more meaningful interaction than a Facebook like or Twitter retweet. Furthermore, you’ll save money, observe better results, and glean a better understanding of what content resonates with your market.

Become An Authority

B2C businesses have the unique privilege to build lifestyle brands predicated on concept, entertainment, and brand image. B2B businesses are not so lucky. When convincing other companies to select your products, your sales pitch will carry far more weight if you’re viewed as an authority than if you’re latest video went viral. That means tackling your marketing in an entirely different manner.

Content marketing was, is, and continues to be the most effective method of marketing in the B2B realm for the reasons mentioned above. Establishing your niche as a though leader in the industry and providing informative articles, videos, and other forms of media from that position builds confidence with customers and encourages engaging conversation that can generate leads. A slick branding aesthetic is a great visual impression, but substance is an asset few other methods of marketing can touch.

Build Your  Email List

With the availability and ease of social media, many businesses ignore the potential of email marketing at their own peril. While it’s true that writing stellar subject lines and building content tailored to the platform is essential for success, the inherent benefits of email are difficult to ignore.

Posts on social media platforms must compete with other posts that effectively dilute the impact of marketing content. Email represents a direct link to the customer, meeting them in a distraction-free setting and therefore communicating information to greater effect. For this reason, an extensive email list is worth far more to your business than a well-followed Twitter account.

Make it a focus of your marketing efforts by making optional registration clear and easy, and delivering content that’s valuable and without fluff. Offer product demonstrations with an email registration or include an opportunity to sign up for your weekly industry newsletter with a well-highlighted registration box on your website. Tailor content to the platform by avoiding pandering, communicating your message quickly and without tricks, and soliciting feedback for future content so that your audience gets what they want, and are therefore more likely to stick around.

Engaging potential clients and customers online is an effective, low-cost way to build leads, drive conversion, and maintain solid relationships with returning visitors. As a B2B business, your circumstances are unique, but presenting your company in the right light, going where your customers are online, building your reputation, and focusing on email are all great ways to turn those circumstances into opportunity.

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'Big Data Is Like Teenage Sex': 4 Ways to Unravel The Mystery

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“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”

Last year TED speaker, best-selling author and Duke University professor Dan Ariely posted this status update on his personal Facebook page. The message has since been shared nearly 800 times across the social network and liked by over 1,700 people. It’s also been widely quoted online, across blogs, forums and news sites.

For years now, Big Data — the name give to the deluge of digital interactions companies have with clients — has been hyped up as a kind of “crude oil” of the new millennium, hugely valuable but useless if unrefined. Yet many businesses still haven’t quite figured out how to take this plentiful resource and turn it into fuel. A recent study by Gartner showed that while 64 percent of companies are deploying or planning to deploy a Big Data project, 56 percent struggle to understand how to get value from their data. A big part of the problem: Advanced software suites and analytics experts are generally needed to make any sense of the terabytes of raw information that can be collected daily.

But social media is increasingly offering ordinary companies entree to the esoteric world of Big Data. Intuitive, subscription-based services from upstart analytics players like Brandwatch, uberVU, HootSuite [my company] and others have started to democratize the kinds of insights once available only to the tech-savvy few.

For businesses looking to leverage social data to their own advantage, applying these basic analytics hacks can be a good place to start:

Filter out the noise: Computer company Dell famously receives more than 25,000 mentions daily on social media channels in 11 different languages. The overwhelming majority of those—from a practical business perspective—are low priority. But by using social media analytics tools, Dell is able to automatically filter for the messages that actually matter: the ones from influential Twitter users with thousands of followers, the stories posted on respected tech blogs and forums, the urgent customer requests that could go viral if left unaddressed.

These tools each apply their own proprietary algorithms to identify the most pressing messages in real-time, taking into account keywords, views and other customizable fields. The end result is that a flood of social media data is reduced to a manageable stream. Companies can then initiate immediate triage in the event of bad news, help spread good news and relay concise information to team members in marketing, sales, customer service or other departments for follow-up.

Be alert to changes in message volume: On the evening of September 2, 2013, the number of Tweets about British Airways began to spike abnormally. And the message wasn’t good. Disgruntled Twitter user Hasan Syed, angry over bags the airline lost, fired off a message that read, "Don't fly @BritishAirways. Their customer service is horrendous." Only instead of sending it off to his followers, he paid to have the message tweeted to an estimated 50,000 other users in New York and the United Kingdom, two of the airline’s key markets.

Incredibly, it was a full 10 hours before British Airways staff finally acknowledged the message and, belatedly, attempted to put out the fire with an apology. By that time, the story had jumped from social media and spread to news outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, from the BBC to Time.

A lot of trouble could have been saved in this case with some fairly simple analytics tools. Changes in message volume on social media, like the one British Airways experienced, often indicate that something significant is up—either good or, as in this case, bad. Alerts can be set up to monitor mentions of a company’s name and other keywords and issue warning emails when any unusual spikes in activity occur. This enables businesses to get ahead of P.R. mishaps, address concerns and prevent incidents from spiralling out of control.

Track sentiment: Back in 2009, one little booger caused one huge problem for Domino’s pizza. An employee filmed himself picking his nose at work, then uploaded the video to YouTube. Predictably, the footage went viral, seen at least a million times before being pulled down. For Domino’s, the video and ensuing uproar—outlets from The New York Times to NBC ran stories on “booger-gate”—sent already low customer ratings into a downward spiral.

To fight back, Domino’s changed their recipe, offered money-back guarantees and set up a microsite where diners could upload real shots of their food. Meanwhile, they tracked changes in public opinion on social media to fine tune each aspect of their campaign. In the end, this multi-million-dollar “mea culpa” was a dramatic success. Sales in U.S. locations increased 14 percent in the quarter after the campaign and share price rocketed 75 percent the following year.

Today, this kind of nuanced sentiment tracking can be accomplished instantly. Social analytics software—which automatically scans the text of thousands of messages to reveal share of positive, negative and neutral sentiment—can give companies a real-time window into how consumers feel about their product, their brand, competitors or any combination of keywords. By monitoring search terms overtime, brands can see how opinion evolves in response to events inside and outside the company and shift strategy accordingly.

Impress the boss—Choose software that spits out snazzy reports: Wintry weather isn’t the only PR challenge Southwest Airlines has faced in recent years. There was the time a pilot accidentally left his radio on, filling Texas airspace with a homophobic rant about his flight attendants—an incident that drew more than 10,000 social media mentions. And then there was the time a hole opened up in a fuselage mid-flight; passengers taking advantage of free Wi-Fi tweeted about the incident as it happened.

Yet, through it all, Southwest, has managed to avoid major wounds and, in fact, was named number one in customer service in the 2013 Airline Quality Ratings. A big part of that, no doubt, has to do with the carrier’s passionate social media community, which now numbers 1.6-million Twitter followers and 4.2-million Facebook Likes. Southwest’s Social Business and Listening Team has spent years cultivating and expanding this community, improving the airline’s visibility, boosting loyalty and helping it to grow despite the occasional P.R. setback.

Still, communicating the value of social media to company executives focused relentlessly on the bottom line isn’t always easy. Nearly three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs have no presence whatsoever on social networks. Despite social media’s rapid spread, deep skepticism persists among many executives, for whom Twitter and Facebook represent little more than funny cat videos or—at best—“soft” tools for networking.

Analytics offers an antidote. Current tools often include sophisticated reporting functions, capable of spitting out boardroom-ready charts tracking changes in brands’ overall visibility and sentiment with time or comparing growth against competitors. Armed with these visual aids, marketing and community teams can show stats-minded executives that social media actually makes sense for business.

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Can Best Buy Survive?

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Best Buy has been around for decades. Known for having the latest and greatest technology for you to play with, or “try before you buy,” and its team of experts in blue shirts, it is a brand that I would argue is a household name.

But the other names it gets called in many households these days are less than flattering, an indicative of its status as a company “on the decline” because of its inability to adjust to today’s market. They are still a household name, but so were Circuit City in the US and Comet in the UK. Those other two household names are usually preceded with the phrase, “whatever happened to…?”

Unfortunately, Best Buy like many big brands has lost its way. Generally, the things that made them great are not that great anymore. Common complaints are that the sales staff is apathetic and unknowledgeable, that items are out-of-stock and that prices are too high when compared to online sites like Amazon.com.

Best Buy says they are trying to get back to what made them great. Their president of U.S. retail, Shawn Score is in charge of the overhaul. Starting as a clerk in their store 26 years ago, Score has worked his way to his present position. His top priority is to change the public opinion about Best Buy and to “end the shoppers' hurt.” He accused his organization of letting their “customer service muscle atrophy.” He is even reported to have a white binder on his desk that says, “Pain Points.”

I love that binder and this story. When I hear a huge corporation with a household name like Best Buy that acknowledges that this is important and even better, that they have let this area slide and see that it is to blame for their current predicament, I feel like a proud papa whose lecture has finally sunk in to his progeny.

At Beyond Philosophy we talk a lot about the sustainable business differentiators. With so many channels and the commoditization of most products and services across the globe brought together by the web, it becomes more and more apparent that finding a way to stand out is the only way to survive. Focusing on the customer experience is the best and most sustainable way to stand out.

Most businesses fall into one of four distinct orientations on their journey to delivering a great Customer Experience. At Beyond Philosophy we call this The Journey from Naïve to Natural. The four orientations include; Naïve, Transactional, Enlightened, and Natural. We cover this model on our Customer Experience Management live webinar training certification.

Based on what I am reading from Score, I would put Best Buy at the transactional phase currently, but with designs on moving to the Enlightened phase. The enlightened phase is what we call an organization that has recognized a need for a holistic, coordinated, and deliberate approach to the customer experience.

From my Second book, Revolutionize Your Customer Experience:

The Enlightened oriented organization understands the importance of the Customer Experience and has thus achieved enlightenment. It has converted from being reactive to proactive to customer demands. It has understood the critical nature of defining the Customer Experience it is trying to deliver.”

I see in these words from Score a move toward enlightenment for Best Buy. But its actions will show me whether they are actually there.

But in a move late last year to buy back the first-generation Surface Tablets for $350 just before the launch of the second generation, they are taking action to addressing another concern of consumers as well: the pace of change in electronics Best Buy Executives talk about how technology is overwhelming to most consumers, developing and changing faster than they can adapt. This promotion gave consumers a store credit that they can apply to the purchase of a new second-generation tablet or anything else in the store.

In a way, it’s like they are buying back the consumers trust that Best Buy is knowledgeable, helpful, and on their side in their quest to have the latest and greatest of technology affordably. I feel this is especially consumer-focused as Microsoft still hasn’t committed to a buy-back program for Surface users.

I will watch with interest to see if Best Buy can turn around it’s poor performance of late and build its brand again. If Best Buy can find a way to turn it around and fight it’s way back to the top of the electronics retail heap, it will serve as inspiration to other failing brands, like Wal-Mart and JC Penney, to name a couple.

So just like a Dad on the side-lines at his kid’s soccer match, I will root for Best Buy to make the goal. I believe if they are committed to the concept of customer focus and recreating an excellent customer experience, they might have a chance.

But it leads me to wonder what you think. So I ask you, “What would you do if you were Best Buy?” Put your answers in the comment below.