1. Arrive just after 9pm.
2. We eventually find fans after a five minute search in roughly the right area.
3. There is one fan left in a rather abused looking box.
4. We opt to lug it around as it is the last fan – well Mr D lugs it around.
5. Arrive at salad counter.
6. No large salad bowls – in fact there are only small salad bowls.
7. No staff on the entire delicatessen isle.
8. Mr D leaves me waiting (battered fan box at feet) while he attempts to find invisible staff.
9. Mr D tracks down 2 staff members who are chatting amongst themselves.
10. Mr D asks for help and explains what he needs.
11. One staff member just says, “Sorry can’t help you.”
12. Surprised and a little taken aback Mr D looks at other staff member.
13. Second more helpful staff member musters a weak, “I’ll try.”
14. More helpful staff member walks very slowly towards salad counter.
15. More helpful staff member shuffles around behind salad counter for about three minutes…
16. More helpful staff member mumbles in frustration to herself.
17. More helpful staff member can only find medium salad bowls.
18. More helpful staff member, “Sorry medium’s all we’ve got”.
19. ”That will have to do says,” says Mr D, “Thanks anyway.”
20. We opt for the self service till as we only have two items.
21. Fan is unrecognised at till. I am ready to scream at this point. I just want to get home!
22. Four attempts of frazzled self service staff member to get the fan through the till.
23. This fiasco lasts about eight minutes.
24. Defeated we suggest we use the main till area to the frazzled staff members relief.
25. Mr D and I now realise that 75% of tills are shut including the less than ten item isles.
26. Frustrated we have to queue behind massive trolley lady.
27. Wait ten minutes.
28. Eventually get out of the horrible shop 35 long minutes after our arrival.
29. ”Shouldn’t have bothered,” says Mr D looking at me. “Hope the salad’s worth it!”
30. ”I won’t come back here in a rush!” I say to Mr D.

My point? This experience made me feel unworthy and unimportant as a customer. One fan and a salad are probably worthless to them but I’m sure they’d be interested in my weekly shop for the next ten years. An average shop of £120 a week over my next ten years of life equates to £62,400 after all. But I certainly won’t be doing my weekly shop at this food store! This experience confirmed to me that our philosophy must be right – everything we do in our business is aimed at establishing long term relationships with our customers and nothing important to a customer is unimportant to us. What’s your customer service philosophy?

Examining trust
Dictionary.com defines trust as, “Reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.” It goes on, “The obligation or responsibility imposed on a person in whom confidence or authority is placed: a position of trust.” This got me thinking. Do we automatically inherit a position of authority because we are offering a product or a service? Yes and no. Yes, because when you offering something to potential customers it is your responsibility to ensure you provide something worth the money they are paying you. Don’t abuse your position as service or product provider by using your jargon infested language and hard sell cajoling to confuse people into buying. The answer is also no because you certainly do not automatically gain a position of authority or trust.

Unravelling you marketing to gain trust
So, how does this relate to your marketing and communications? Here’s a three point guide to achieving communications that can contribute to achieving a strong connection to your target audience so that when they need your service or product they choose you.

1. Unravel
   Simplify your message. Through consistency, straightforwardness that cuts to the chase and design you can achieve effortless communications that make sense and powerfully speak of solutions, solutions, solutions. As Leonardo Da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.”
2. Unmarket
   Engage with your customers by connecting on a deeper level. Instead of shouting loudly to no one in particular about all the great but meaningless things you can do, learn about your specific customers’ emotional needs and satisfy them. Make people feel happy, proud, successful or full of energy for example and you’ll go further than presenting yourself in boring, useless industry lingo.
3. Unsell
   Authenticity is one of my personal values and it just means to be genuine. If you love what you do and you are passionate about your approach, this will come across in the way you provide workable solutions for your customers. How hard is it to be yourself, to be honest and to avoid hard sell approaches? (Hard selling does NOT work and does your name more harm than good). Another aspect of how to ‘unsell’ is to listen! You must have heard the saying, “We have one mouth and two ears for a reason.” Give your customers a chance to speak to you and listen to them. It’s only by listening to a problem or challenge that you can provide a solution to it.

What are your thoughts on unravelling, unmarketing and unselling?

P.S. Look out for Scott Stratten’s up and coming book, ‘UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging’ which is due out in autumn.

The lady explained how the website she had commissioned looked like an own brand off the shelf template with no quality to speak of. She found that the content was written with more emphasise towards ‘Google bots’ than human understanding (note that Google doesn’t even like dehumanised content). Design is like buying an invisible product. You can’t pick it up and give it a shake or try before you buy. It’s almost indefinable. So how do you avoid the design headache experienced by some?  

We recommend you ask the following six questions about your design team:

1. Most importantly, are they multi disciplinary? Building a website for example, involves web hosting and domain services, copywriting, site navigation, image sourcing, branding, web development, search engine optimisation, project management and design. It’s not just a big hole called ‘web design’ and the language of your team and your estimate of works should reflect this.
2. Do they have fans? Nothing speaks louder than what other people say.
3. Do you like what you see? Assess a portfolio of work. If you don’t like what you see it’s unlikely you will ever like their style.
4. Do you click? Take time out to meet the designer and if you don’t gel then don’t force the relationship.
5. What’s hidden in the small print? Don’t get caught out with the unforeseen.
6. Are they listening? Seriously, conversation should flow, not be one way. In fact you should be talking more, expressing your needs, your goals, your likes and dislikes.

…As for the project, we will keep you posted.

Should we allow all important growth enhancing projects to keep slipping because they are so large that we can never finish them? Or is it important to admit that though perfection should be something we strive for as a business, sometimes it’s better to phase growth, to produce something tangible in key phases and allow the business to grow organically? (Even if that means a few faults are on show at times?)

To answer these questions I’m going to bare all by using sb as an example.

We recently redesigned this website. For months we knew it was to be in with the new. Every minute detail was planned to absolute perfection. We had one major problem though — our schedule kept slipping. New jobs came in and scheduled projects took longer than planned. We never seemed to get the final site good enough to go public with.

About a month ago the deadline to complete this website sailed by. Again. We needed to take drastic action. We bit the bullet and did what every uncompromising business owner is terrified of.

We made phase one of three live even though we knew it wasn’t flawless. For example, we’ve yet to spend time on the SEO (search engine optimisation). A lot of our work comes from referrals and networking contacts, so right now we needed our site and portfolio up more than we needed people to find the site cold. Our portfolio only has three projects in it and does not show a wide enough variety but three up to date projects on show are better than none. These are just two examples from a long outstanding to do list!

In short, you may feel like you are settling for less when you know your customers may spot imperfect aspects of your business. But for a small business that hasn’t got massive budgets or teams of people to get jobs done the conundrum is a difficult one. It’ll be different for every business but overall it’s better to get out there, get active and get visible than to hide away and use incomplete projects as an excuse. After all, a clever step by step approach may help you to appear more human and actually appeal to your potential customers. At least we hope so!