Start With Why (5 page)

There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you. Loyal customers often don’t even bother to research the competition or entertain other options. Loyalty is not easily won. Repeat business, however, is. All it takes is more manipulations.

Manipulative techniques have become such a mainstay in American business today that it has become virtually impossible for some to kick the habit. Like any addiction, the drive is not to get sober, but to find the next fix faster and more frequently. And as good as the short-term highs may feel, they have a deleterious impact on the long-term health of an organization. Addicted to the short-term results, business today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one after another after another. The short-term tactics have become so sophisticated that an entire economy has developed to service the manipulations, equipped with statistics and quasi-science. Direct marketing companies, for example, offer calculations about which words will get the best results on each piece of direct mail they send out.

Those that offer mail-in rebates know the incentive works and they know that the higher the rebate, the more effective it is. They also know the cost that goes along with those rebates. To make them profitable, manufacturers rely on the breakage and slippage numbers staying above a certain threshold. Just like our trusty drug addict, whose behavior is reinforced by how good the short-term high feels, the temptation to make the qualifications of the rebate more obscure or cumbersome so as to reduce the number of qualified applicants can be overwhelming for some.

Samsung, the electronics giant, mastered the art of the kind of fine print that makes rebates so profitable for companies. In the early 2000s, the company offered rebates up to $150 on a variety of electronic products, stipulating in the fine print that the rebate was limited to one per address—a requirement that would have sounded reasonable enough to anyone at the time. Yet in practice, it effectively disqualified all customers who lived in apartment buildings where more than one resident had applied for the same rebate. More than 4,000 Samsung customers lured by the cash back received notices denying them rebates on those grounds. The practice was brought to the attention of the New York attorney general, and in 2004 Samsung was ordered to pay $200,000 in rebate claims to apartment dwellers. This is an extreme case of a company that got caught. But the rebate game of cutting out UPC symbols, filling out forms and doing it all before the deadline is alive and well. How can a company claim to be customer-focused when they are so comfortable measuring the number of customers who will fail to realize any promise of savings?

“It’s simple,” explains the TV infomercial, “simply put your old gold jewelry in the prepaid, insured envelope and we’ll send you a check for the value of the gold in just two days.” Mygoldenvelope .com is one of the leaders in this industry, serving as a broker for gold to be sent to a refinery, melted down, and reintroduced into the commodity market.

When Douglas Feirstein and Michael Moran started the company, they wanted to be the best in the business. They wanted to transform an industry with the reputation of a back-alley pawn shop and give it a bit of a Tiffany’s sheen. They invested money in making the experience perfect. They worked to make the customer service experience ideal. They were both successful entrepreneurs and knew the value of building a brand and a strong customer experience. They’d spent a lot of money trying to get the balance right, and they made sure to explain their difference in direct response advertising on various local and national cable stations. “Better than the similar offers,” they’d say. And they were right. But the investment didn’t pay off as expected.

A few months later, Feirstein and Moran made a significant discovery: almost all of their customers did business with them only once. They had a transactional business yet they were trying to make it so much more than that. So they stopped trying to make their service “better than similar offers,” and instead settled with good. Given that most people were not going to become repeat customers, there weren’t going to be any head-to-head comparisons made to the other services. All they needed to do was drive a purchase decision and offer a pleasant enough experience that people would recommend it to a friend. Any more was unnecessary. Once the owners of
mygoldenvelope.com
realized they didn’t need to invest in the things that build loyalty if all they wanted to do was drive transactions, their business became vastly more efficient and more profitable.

For transactions that occur an average of once, carrots and sticks are the best way to elicit the desired behavior. When the police offer a reward they are not looking to nurture a relationship with the witness or tipster; it is just a single transaction. When you lose your kitten and offer a reward to get it back, you don’t need to have a lasting relationship with the person returning it; you just want your cat back.

Manipulations are a perfectly valid strategy for driving a transaction, or for any behavior that is only required once or on rare occasions. The rewards the police use are designed to incentivize witnesses to come forward to provide tips or evidence that may lead to an arrest. And, like any promotion, the manipulation will work if the incentive feels high enough to mitigate the risk.

In any circumstance in which a person or organization wants more than a single transaction, however, if there is a hope for a loyal, lasting relationship, manipulations do not help. Does a politician want your vote, for example, or does he or she want a lifetime of support and loyalty from you? (Judging by how elections are run these days, it seems all they want is to win elections. Ads discrediting opponents, a focus on single issues, and an uncomfortable reliance on fear or aspirational desires are all indicators. Those tactics win elections, but they do not seed loyalties among the voters.)

The American car industry learned the hard way the high cost of relying on manipulations to build a business when loyalty was what they really needed to nurture. While manipulations may be a viable strategy when times are good and money is flush, a change in market conditions made them too expensive. When the oil crisis of 2008 hit, the auto industry’s promotions and incentives became untenable (the same thing happened in the 1970s). In this case, how long the manipulations could produce short-term gains was defined by the length of time the economy could sustain the strategy. This is a fundamentally weak platform upon which to build a business, an assumption of never-ending boom. Though loyal customers are less tempted by other offers and incentives, in good times the free flow of business makes it hard to recognize their value. It’s in the tough times that loyal customers matter most.

Manipulations work, but they cost money. Lots of money. When the money is not as available to fund those tactics, not having a loyal following really hurts. After September 11, there were customers who sent checks to Southwest Airlines to show their support. One note that accompanied a check for $1,000 read, “You’ve been so good to me over the years, in these hard times I wanted to say thank you by helping you out.” The checks that Southwest Airlines received were certainly not enough to make any significant impact on the company’s bottom line, but they were symbolic of the feeling customers had for the brand. They had a sense of partnership. The loyal behavior of those who didn’t send money is almost impossible to measure, but its impact has been invaluable over the long term, helping Southwest to maintain its position as the most profitable airline in history.

Knowing you have a loyal customer and employee base not only reduces costs, it provides massive peace of mind. Like loyal friends, you know your customers and employees will be there for you when you need them most. It is the feeling of “we’re in this together,” shared between customer and company, voter and candidate, boss and employee, that defines great leaders.

In contrast, relying on manipulations creates massive stress for buyer and seller alike. For the buyer, it has become increasingly difficult to know which product, service, brand or company is best. I joke about the proliferation of toothpaste varieties and the difficulty of choosing the right one. But toothpaste is just a metaphor. Nearly every decision we’re asked to make every single day is like choosing toothpaste. Deciding what law firm to hire, college to attend, car to buy, company to work for, candidate to elect—there are just too many choices. All the advertising, promotions and pressure employed to tempt us one way or another, each attempting to push harder than the other to court us for our money or our support, ultimately yields one consistent result: stress.

For the companies too, whose obligation it is to help us decide, their ability to do so has gotten more and more difficult. Every day, the competition is doing something new, something better. To constantly have to come up with a new promotion, a new guerrilla marketing tactic, a new feature to add, is hard work. Combined with the long-term effects of years of short-term decisions that have eroded profit margins, this raises stress levels inside organizations as well. When manipulations are the norm, no one wins.

It’s not an accident that doing business today, and being in the workforce today, is more stressful than it used to be. Peter Whybrow, in his book
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
, argues that many of the ills that we suffer from today have very little to do with the bad food we’re eating or the partially hydrogenated oils in our diet. Rather, Whybrow says, it’s the way that corporate America has developed that has increased our stress to levels so high we’re literally making ourselves sick because of it. Americans are suffering ulcers, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety, and cancer at record levels. According to Whybrow, all those promises of more, more, more are actually overloading the reward circuits of our brain. The short-term gains that drive business in America today are actually destroying our health.

The danger of manipulations is that they work. And because manipulations work, they have become the norm, practiced by the vast majority of companies and organizations, regardless of size or industry. That fact alone creates a systemic peer pressure. With perfect irony, we, the manipulators, have been manipulated by our own system. With every price drop, promotion, fear-based or aspirational message, and novelty we use to achieve our goals, we find our companies, our organizations and our systems getting weaker and weaker.

The economic crisis that began in 2008 is just another, albeit extreme, example of what can happen if a flawed assumption is allowed to carry on for too long. The collapse of the housing market and the subsequent collapse of the banking industry were due to decisions made inside the banks based on a series of manipulations. Employees were manipulated with bonuses that encouraged shortsighted decision-making. Open shaming of anyone who spoke out discouraged responsible dissent. A free flow of loans encouraged aspiring homebuyers to buy more than they could afford at all price levels. There was very little loyalty. It was all a series of transactional decisions—effective, but at a high cost. Few were working for the good of the whole. Why would they?—there was no reason given to do so. There was no cause or belief beyond instant gratification. Bankers weren’t the first to be swept up by their own success. American car manufacturers have conducted themselves the same way for decades—manipulation after manipulation, short-term decision built upon short-term decision. Buckling or even collapse is the only logical conclusion when manipulations are the main course of action.

The reality is, in today’s world, manipulations are the norm.

 

But there is an alternative.

THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
.

There are a few leaders who choose to inspire rather than manipulate in order to motivate people. Whether individuals or organizations, every single one of these inspiring leaders thinks, acts and communicates exactly the same way. And it’s the complete opposite of the rest of us. Consciously or not, how they do it is by following a naturally occurring pattern that I call The Golden Circle.

The concept of The Golden Circle was inspired by the golden ratio—a simple mathematical relationship that has fascinated mathematicians, biologists, architects, artists, musicians and naturists since the beginning of history. From the Egyptians to Pythagoras to Leonardo da Vinci, many have looked to the golden ratio to provide a mathematical formula for proportion and even beauty. It also supports the notion that there is more order in nature than we think, as in the symmetry of leaves and the geometric perfection of snowflakes.