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Brick No125: How to land "Type A" customers
By Matt Weston, Friday 14 January 2005 Fowl Play In April last year, some creative at Burger King's ad agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, came up with this. As the website has it: "Finally, someone in a chicken costume who will do what you want." The Subservient Chicken, (for this is he), obeys over 300 commands. He can "moonwalk", "play air guitar" or "build a fort". But tell him to "eat McDonalds" and you'll get the finger. See this disturbingly colourful list of commands. At face value, the agency can claim a whopping success: 328 million hits from April to October last year, visitors from more than 100 countries. And according to BK, sales are up. But hold the fries. Does subservientchicken.com really make people talk about Burger King, or just about the obedient guy (or gal) in the chicken costume? The link, at best, is tenuous. "Have It Your Way" is a BK slogan. And this is "Have It Your Way With A Chicken". That's the problem: the word-of-mouth here isn't about the product (BK), it's about the campaign (SC). How to land "Type A" customers You may or may not have visited the Subservient Chicken site before today. And you may or may not be a Burger King regular. But I doubt the two answers have any connection. The story goes that Crispin, Porter & Bogusky started the campaign by telling just 20 friends of the agency. And then the word-of-mouth (or mouse) spread. But it's a bit like folding a big sheet of paper in half, and then half, and then half. It becomes impossible after the eighth fold. Likewise, you can only pass on a disconnected message so many times before the product gets lost. Arguably this kind of thing works for Burger King. It's just another kind of meaningless advertising, pitched at the broadest possible audience (a la "probably the best lager in the world" and "wassup"). When the Subservient Chicken runs its course, BK pays an agency to try something new. But it won't work for your small business. If you spread word-of-mouth that is irrelevant to, or disconnected from, your product, you end up with disconnected customers. Instead of landing Type A customers, you land Type C customers. You'll see what I mean if you take a look at Seth Godin's blog. One of Seth's readers wrote in about Brisbane-based dentist, Paddi Lund. One day, Paddi halved his client base. He broke his clients into Type A ("loved what he did, paid on time and told their friends"), Type B and Type C clients ("always complained, turned up late and b*tched about his fees"). He fired all the Type C clients. Paddi stopped advertising for new clients, and relied wholly on word-of-mouth. You could only become a new client if someone referred you. And a condition of becoming a new client was that you had to refer at least 3 others to his business. He realised that Type A customers are most likely to refer other Type A customers. And despite halving his customer base, he doubled his profits. There's a universe of difference between the Type C customers you bring on from a false, disconnected word-of-mouth campaign, and the Type A customers you find when you simply ask your existing customers to spread the word about why your product is special. If Burger King followed this dentist's lead, turned off its advertising and relied wholly on word-of-mouth, what do you think would happen? IMHO, it would disappear. What about your small business? Remember to sign up: back to top |
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