January's Ad Week Post
Recently, I dug deep into my post-Christmas-where’s-all-my-money-gone coffers and went to see 80s UK ska legends Bad Manners skank up a storm. It’d been awhile since I went to a ska gig, and I’d forgotten how much fun they are, not least of all because of the colourful crowd.
During the support act, a man danced across a relatively empty dance floor, middle-fingered either the ceiling or the entire crowd (it was multidirectional) and then continued to dance straight out of the room, never missing a beat.
Adding to the genial nature of the whole event was the cup of coffee placed on the stage, presumably for the band during a break. Not your usual drinking-neat-gasoline rock gig.
Suffice it to say, everyone was in a good mood, having a good time.
And if the people around us are in a good mood, it’s likely to rub off on us.
“People often get a sense of happiness, even though they don’t know where it comes from; it’s probably very likely to come from the happiness of other people,” says Jack Dovidio, a Yale University social psychologist (MSNBC.com).
This is pretty obvious when a social and emotional event like music is involved.
But why should it stop there? Why not when you get a cup of coffee? Or go to the Post Office? Maybe happiness isn’t the right way to look at it – after all, we can’t be happy all the time.
Maybe it’s about being nice.
• I’ve mentioned before about companies being nice, and the word-of-mouth – and other – advantages of giving a $#!& about what your company is perceived as. Which is why it remains frustrating to me for there to be so much bad customer service out there in the big wide world. I’m not expecting false smiles and a (apologies) stereotypically American, “Have a nice day now!” attitude. That would drive me nuts if it happened every time. But it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort to be courteous.
• The best act of customer service I experienced recently came from buying an Internet top-up voucher from a pub on New Year’s Day. Now you KNOW that means that the barman I bought it off was either working the night before – so extremely tired – or partying – and therefore, extremely hungover. But he was just…nice. He even offered me a glass of water while I was waiting. He didn’t up-sell me anything, didn’t try and convince me to stay in his pub and drink, he just asked how I was doing. That’s all.
• And that is all. That is all it takes to get people to come back to your business time and time again. Forget elaborate strategy, forget digital media, forget ATL, BTL, FBI, PTO, whatever. For me, as a consumer, I will almost always go back somewhere if someone was nice. While traveling, you realise that often the best places are the ones that have none of those things that we solicit professionally. They’re small, they’re out of the way, they’re frequently less expensive, and they almost always have good manners.