The Story

I was catching up on the latest season of Smallville the other day and was watching the season finale. One of the characters was in a maze of a building’s air ventilation system and as he was getting navigation directions from another character on the phone he said, “You are my personal MapQuest”. That statement really got me thinking about how often I still hear people use MapQuest as a common vocabulary word, yet I personally haven’t used the service in over 8 years.

The History

MapQuest was one of the first companies in the online map game and for a while they were the only service people were using. Then Google completely changed the game when they decided to get serious about online maps with AJAX maps. After that most people switched to the superior Google Maps while the other players starting playing catch up. Now I personally use Yahoo Maps because I think they do things even better than Google does. I’ve been so satisfied with those two that I have never considered going back to MapQuest.

The Thought

When I hear someone discuss needing online directions it often references MapQuest, such as, “Just MapQuest it” or “I printed the MapQuest to your house”. Are people still actually using MapQuest.com or is that just the verb for “getting online maps” or noun for “directions”?

Whenever I hear MapQuest used by someone I always think of it as the synonym. Which makes for an interesting thought experiment.

The MapQuest brand is so good that it is synonymous with directions. MapQuest = Directions. That is huge for a brand to actually replace people’s common vocabulary words with your service or company. Yet how completely useless is that if no one is actually using their service to get maps. What value would Google get when someone says, “Just google it”, then that person goes to Bing to do their search. Xerox is another good example.

Perhaps I’m wrong in my assumptions about how the general population gets online maps.

The Questions

So here are my questions to those of you haven’t cleaned up their RSS feeds in the past year and so I’m still around.

• Do you primarily use MapQuest for your online mapping needs?
• Do you commonly hear people use “MapQuest” in sentences?
• If you hear, “Just MapQuest it”, do you think the person saying it literally means, “Get your maps from mapquest.com”?
• What can MapQuest do to start cashing in on the successful brand?

The End

Thanks, ba bye.

While heading home I was sitting behind another car at red light. As I patiently sat there, I noticed that the car in front of me had a car wrap on it featuring advertising for his company. From my view all I could see was his bumper and this is all that the back advertising said, “Avis … We Try Harder.” At first it was no big deal to me, but the longer I sat there and stared, the more it bugged me.

I’ve expressed my realization that as I learn more about design I become more critical of everything around me. This sentiment is also true with marketing and business in general. Here’s what upset me about this guy and his car wrap.

First, Avis isn’t that well known of a company to get by on simply brand name recognition alone. For those who’ve never heard of them, they are a car rental business. So if I didn’t know what Avis did, then knowing that they “try harder” doesn’t really matter to me. The advertising needed to briefly explain what business they were in.

Second, after giving this ordeal a bit of thought, I believe that the bumper portion on the car wrap is the most important place. Yes, you can put better graphics on the side where there is a nice smooth surface, but there’s one important thing about the back that the sides or front can’t get. The back side of a car gets someone’s undivided attention. In my case, I was sitting at a painfully long light and had nothing else to do but sit and stare in front of me. You can’t get that type of attention elsewhere. Someone might glance to the side and see the side panel advertising, but they aren’t forced to sit and read what’s there. A few seconds of their attention is all you get from them. The most effective advertising is the one that gets read, and re-read.

Last, because I am so outraged by this travesty of advertising, I am making an oath to never rent a car from Avis ever again. Ok, not really, but I felt like I needed a third reason. If you’ve got a better third reason, please add a comment with it.

The car wrap guy missed an opportunity to drive home a message to people that are and aren’t aware of the company. Instead of turning the 2 minutes of uninterrupted attention he got from me to explain what Avis does and why I should think of them when I need a car rental, all I get is a “We Try Harder”. And don’t get me started on why I feel that line in and of itself is so pathetic. We TRY, are you kidding me, is that all you have to tell me is that I should pick you because you TRY harder, p-a-lease …

When I was at college I would often see a person standing on the street advertising for a local tattoo parlor. The sign he held said, “Tattoos. Half Priced. Today Only”. Every time I drove by him I couldn’t help but think that the person in charge was failing at some basic Marketing 101 principles.

Know Thy Customer

Although I don’t have a tattoo I can only speculate that the main concern of someone who is about to endure a painful procedure to permanently bind ink to their skin isn’t the price. If I were getting a tattoo, quality would be of utmost importance.

A tattoo isn’t a whimsical purchase. I can’t imagine that anyone who saw that sign whipped their car into the tattoo parlor and got branded just because it’s a good deal. People spend thousands and fly to distant cities to get their tattoos.

Answer your customer’s main concern.

If price isn’t the tipping point to get business, then don’t advertise it. Advertise that your quality is unbeatable.

Consider what you’re selling and what factors cause people to use you or go with your competitors.

Maybe you are not selling yourself correctly.

P.S. Naomi wants to remind you to proofread your tattoo designs before getting them done.

So why do DVDs use the term "deleted scenes" when they are promoting extra features on the DVD sleeve. Things that are deleted are typically errors and mistakes. The word "delete" has the connotation of trash being discarded.

While most scenes that are cut from the movie and worthy of being deleted (except anything from The Office. I swear they shoot an hour-long show and just cut out half in post production.) I would still think the marketing of the DVD would list them as "extra scenes" or "unreleased footage".

Delete = screwup

Extra = added value

K, I’m done now.

I have a few thoughts about that I’d like to share about marketing and the difference between perception and reality.

Marketing At Its Finest

I believe this retraining was mainly a marketing ploy for a few reasons.

Why in the middle of the afternoon?

There is no reason that the reeducation couldn’t take place after hours. Having the employees stay an hour extra after the store closing for a few nights a week to be retrained would have worked just as well. My opinion, if it would have happened after hours then the reeducation would have been a non-issue. Which leads to my next point.

Any Publicity is Good, but Good Publicity is Great.

Lately the only news I’d heard about Starbucks had been bad. Their stock was dropping. McDonald’s plans to compete. Yada yada yada. I believe that this was done to change customers’ attitude about the joint from negative to positive. The afternoon closing was well publicized. In fact I heard about it happening a few days in advance. Why I needed advanced warning that I won’t be able to purchase coffee from my neighborhood coffee conglomerate for only 3 hours is beyond me. On the day of the closing I saw several news articles and heard my local radio hosts talking about it. Even some competitors helped with the hype by running special ads promoting free or reduced coffee at their place while Starbucks was down.

Perceived Value

Even after giving you my reasons for why the stunt was done in this way, I still had the urge to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s my thinking ,
"Since Starbucks lost over 21,000 hours of possible sales to make itself better, I need to go get a Starbucks and see if it is better."

And…

It was.

The service was better.

The atmosphere felt cozier.

The mocha tasted better than it ever had.

All these things lead me to this question, "Had I not known anything about the 3 hour closing, and just happened to come in the following day, would I have noticed any difference?"

Maybe I would have noticed a few slight differences, but when I went in the day after I was looking for a difference. When I walked in expecting grand changes, I noticed grand changes. The decor gave off a home-town feeling. The music set the right mood. The barista chirped a friendly, "Hello!" The drink was perfectly soothing.

I asked the newly retrained barista if she’d noticed an increase in sales for the day and she confided that they were about $3,000 over their usual sales for the day (I went in around 7pm).

Apparently other people had the same urge as I did.

Closing Remarks

I’m not saying that all these improvements are made up in my head, there are some noticeable improvements in service and quality. I am just curious how much better it actually is now and how I would have reacted if I hadn’t known of the changes taking place.

How influenced are we by hype that it affects our experience? If we were to live without any expectation how much better/worse would we perceive things?