BREAKING BREAD (not bad)

Retailers have re-discovered their mate:  Restaurants.  Until its meatball mess, Ikea was known for its café-home furnishings combo.  Walmart and Target, for their snacks-while-shopping lures.  Now, Tommy Bahama claims its recently introduced in-store eateries generate twice the sales per square foot of apparel.

Another duo follows:  News organizations and politicians (and anyone else who’s got a soapbox).  Today, frequent breakfasts with Paul or Larry or Bob, when combined with The Wall Street Journal or The Christian Science Monitor, have a certain panache and appeal.  Not to mention frequent business conversations and occasional deals.

Once upon a time, though, establishments like the late-great Marshall Field’s as well as Neiman Marcus built dining places inside.  The Walnut Room and Zodiac restaurant were, respectively, part of the experience.  Then, hours-long in-store shopping was the norm.  There were no cyber worlds, no flash sales.  It was a time to relax, to be with friends, reflect on the day, and, oh yes, buy what you needed as well as feed your selves.

The power of a meal to begin (and continue) relationships is one we all acknowledge.   Inside organizations, especially in buildings with cafeterias, many leaders do take the opportunity of a mid-day snack or lunch or break to sit and listen to colleagues and employees.    All good.

But why not more often, more off-the-cuff dialogues over a meal or a cuppa?   Sure, there’s always a tendency to clam up when a C-suite executive meanders in and sits at a table.  Or to resort to small talk.  Or to studiously avoid the table or make excuses about getting back to work.  Yet many workers are yearning for just that kind of connection, to understand leaders and their motivations.  Study after study shows a real need to personalize the workplace, to forget a relationship with their managers and executives

A bit of orchestration, at first, might be necessary.  Creating natural venues to have a conversation can be staged, first (especially around food!).   Later, more natural and impromptu opportunities occur as colleagues and coworkers and chiefs get to know each other. 

After all, it started with the Old and the New Testament:  Breaking bread is about the food and the fellowship. 

OUR CUPS DON'T RUNNETH OVER

It’s sorta expected, in our business.

After all, we’re outside experts or, at the best, business partners who work with companies on a variety of short- and long-term projects. Though we might be around for a while, we’re definitely hired help.

All fine.  So the idea of thanks (given to us) is somewhat novel, and one that’s never guaranteed.  Nonetheless, we do perk up when we hear good words, and remember the whos and whats of the conversation.

What’s unexpected, though, is the endemic lack of thanks today in the workplace, full-time colleagues and leaders who work for one company.  In its typical fashion, The Wall Street Journal, late last year, riffed on a recent “there’s no gratitude” survey, then proceeded to set up a typology of those managers who just couldn’t show appreciation.   To us, the publication’s five characters were (pick one):  1) somewhat stereotyped, 2) overblown, and/or 3) created for the sake of a headline.

For whatever reasons (and feel free to make up your own), thanks just isn’t embedded in contemporary vocabularies.  Or, if it is, it’s somehow, er, fake.  How many times have you gotten an e-missive that, oh by the way, acknowledges your contributions (usually the middle of a list of things you have to do)?  Or been lobbed an off-handed compliment on the way out the door?

We’re not imagining this.  Survey says, for instance, that only 10 percent utter a thank you to colleagues, while 7 percent manage to be gracious to the boss-person.  Are dollars or other tangible rewards good substitutes for an authentic note about “job well done”?  Is everyone way too busy to look back and forward on a day’s work to compliment the support given?  Or do we need to add an amendment to the Ten Big Ones about being grateful each and every day?

Aretha, you got it right. 

PICK ME ... PLEASE!

Right before the 2012 holidays, Pepsi nabbed Beyoncé as its brand ambassador in exchange for a 50-million-dollar paycheck. 

She’ll be more than window dressing, say the marketers, partnering with the beverage giant to create content and drive fan engagement.  One example:  At Super Bowl halftime, fans got their 15 minutes of fame in ad photos by shouting, head bopping, and feet tapping, solicited in advance. 

This kind of high-powered deal is rooted in the mid-2000s, when will.i.am joined Intel as director of creative innovation, deals that then branched out to include Lady Gaga’s effort with Polaroid and 50 Cent endorsement of Vitamin Water in song and in ads.

Yet how much more credible and authentic are these celebrity endorsements than the Pizza Hut and Southwest Airlines and Overstock.com employees who’ve appeared in their company ads?  In this skeptical age, most viewers, for one, know that a Sofia Vergara or a Brad Pitt aren’t true brand ambassadors; rather, they’re paid advocates for the product (or service).  Sure, they’ll drink the soda, even wear the perfume, and don the apparel. But how knowledgeable are they, really, about the product attributes, its fit with the overall brand, primary consumers and their emotions, and so on?  Do they field customer complaints (and compliments), understand supply chain issues and opportunities, and/or struggle with IT/IS problems? 

[No sour grapes here.  Any one of us would jump at the chance for a million-buck endorsement, let alone 50 times that number!]

Instead, companies looking for ambassadors – including the CPG stalwarts – might do well by scouring internal files to uncover soon-to-be stars.  Even today, when engagement is reportedly at an all-time low (Forrester noted two years ago that a high percentage of employees would not perform stand-ups for their employers), the deep credibility and trust that real people engender among consumers new and old is simply not to be dismissed. 

We’ll stop … with one more question.  Hey, new Coca-Cola Ambassador Taylor Swift:  Does Diet Coke truly understand you just because it’s in your frig?

STORIES FROM THE FRONT: What we learned at retail

Been a regular devotee of Communicating By Design?  Then you’ll know we’re passionate, even batty about visual therapy; we go shopping often to get a regular dose of ideas and (in)sanity.

No kidding.

Our latest Eureka! emanates from the year-or-so-old retail tempest, called “showrooming.”  It’s an activity by a consumer who visits or calls a bricks and mortar outlet to check out products, then goes home, clicks, and buys online. 

At least one august b-school research claims that move is all about price.  Sure:  “Who’s got it cheapest” is definitely a motivator for many would-be buyers.  Other surveying institutions attribute the trend to less-than-satisfactory in-store customer service.  [And who among us can’t throw a stone, even at some of the best in the business?]

Target, for instance, has countered by pulling Kindle Fire and other Amazon products from its shelves. Some merchants add services or special deals to entice in-store buying.

Now it’s time to turn that topic inside out and relate it to our issues:  How many candidates or potential employees showroom your Web site?  Or surf the Web, even read print media and ask friends and family to check out your company and the deal it offers to its associates?  What does vault.com (or other online evaluators) say about working at Company XYZ?  What kind of “customer” service do prospects receive when contacted about a position … even when they’ve advanced to being a high-potential candidate?  How well do they understand what the company’s all about … if they’ve only clicked through your Web presence?

Yes, countering this slightly different form of showrooming is the province of human resources.  It should also be the territory of marketing and branding and design and communications, in partnership with the CPO.  Because no one function, no one department owns 100 percent of the real estate that attracts (or not) new employees. 

We all cover the front.

SAD AND GLAD ... AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

With Valentine’s Day in the recent past, we were musing about expressions of like and love in these e-days.  If not before.

Few realize that, even before Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was born, Morse Code and Puck magazine and satirist Ambrose Bierce all talked about love and kisses and vertical emoticons and snigger points.  Though a Carnegie Mellon University student might have proposed the idea in the 1980s, today, emoticons – and their Japanese smartphone cousins, emoji – have become world-wide substitutes for saying how we feel, digitally.   Teens we know use these pictographs extensively in texts (in fact, often without words).  And yes, we’ll admit a guilty pleasure in occasionally using a smiley or frowny or LOL symbol when we’re e-talking with good friends and colleagues.

Think with us, though.  How frequently do these symbols truly portray what we’re up to emotionally, in the moment?  Is it easy to show our concerns or fears within our smartphones or Outlook or Lotus Notes?  Have your colleagues misunderstood your intent within the message’s content?  And if so, how long did it take you to explain what you meant?

That’s been the task lately of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, charged with interpreting political sentiments of Twitter feeds.  The most difficult analysis, says a spokesperson, is determining sarcasm.  The computer does so in a unique combination featuring human and data-mining services, but not always successfully.

Remedies run from adopting new pictographs (yet another visual to remember!) to avoiding the sentiment altogether.  One reason to discontinue these pictures:  Researchers have discovered that millennials and younger tweeters use emoticons sarcastically as well as to show a lack of feeling altogether.

No surprise:  But why don’t we, as the ultimate communication and marketing professionals, set the new standard?  Like picking up the phone.  And meeting face to face.