BrandingFire Blog

I ran across a nice site called Cultural Heritage Tourism run by (again) The National Trust for Historic Preservation. On their site, they list the Five Principles for Successful and Sustainable Cultural Heritage Tourism. It’s worth a read. The third principle - Make Sites and Programs Come Alive - really hit a cord for me.

Here’s one that definitely needs to be filed under “It’s a Small World”. I recently blogged about how Which Wich feels the love from their customers. In a very cool move, the president and founder of Which Wich, Jeff Sinelli, commented on the post about how they LOVE their customers. He also pointed me to their blog, which I had to check out.

You see, I’ve loved Which Wich since they opened up their local store. I keep two of their sandwich bags on my desk (I know, I’m strange). Once is from one of my first sandwiches there. The other is one with franchise information. I won’t be getting into a franchise anytime soon, but I really love the place and the concept and was enamored to learn more about them. I even read articles on Mr. Sinelli and hoped to meet him some day, to at least say hello and thanks.

My chance may come soon. When I read the Which Wich blog I saw a post about getting a free t-shirt. Since free is my favorite price, they had my attention. I read that someone had set out on an adventure to have all 51 varieties of Which Wich. The shock came when I realized I know the “someone“. Chris and I worked together at the same company for two years.

Here’s the really cool thing: Jeff Sinelli, or someone on his team, apparently has alerts in places like Google so that he’s notified whenever someone writes about Which Wich on the Internet. (Hint: If you’re not doing this, do it TODAY!) That means Mr. Sinelli can find people who are hot for his restaurant and fan that passion into a roaring fire. It also means he can head off customers’ troubles and deal with them immediately… and personally. Mr. Sinelli found out about Chris’s adventure and called Chris to support him in his endevor.

The Which Wich folks have even created this limited edition t-shirt (scarcity = demand) in honor of Chris (love your customers) and have offered them free to customers (love your customer… and collect their contact info). In addition, Jeff Sinelli and some of his team will be traveling to Nashville, TN to have lunch with Chris and 50 of his closest friends (love your customer, event marketing… & good PR) to celebrate. This is all such freakin’ great marketing that I almost can’t stand it. But it’s not normal, everyday, ooh-I-feel-icky, fake marketing. This is passion-for-your-brand, love-your-customers, open-the-lines-of-communication, un-ordinary marketing. I’ll be at that lunch, and I just want to shake Mr. Sinelli’s hand and say, “You and your team are awesome!” And to Chris Thomas I say, “Congrats on being the first one into The 51 Club!”

Now, I ask again, do your customers love you that much? Do you love them that much?

BTW, just found out the shirts are all gone.

I never intended for my first post on the BrandingFire blog to be of a political nature. But Seth Godin, whose work and ideas I admire greatly, posted something on his blog today for which I just had to add to the conversation. In this post, Thinking About This War, Seth says that one of the greatest weapons we have in a post-9/11 world is good marketing. I’ve thought for more than 10 years that a good marketing campaign can be as effective (though not always as fast) as a strong army for implementing regime and policy change around the world. But what really got me was where Seth said government frequently prefers enforcement to changing people’s behavior with good marketing.

Take, for instance, my home town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Government and citizens will sometimes get cross-wise from each other. That’s to be expected. But when government continually goes against the public grain, that’s the sign of a problem. Three examples from Murfreesboro are:

1. Annexation - The city has been annexing stray areas of county land in order to consolidate the city limits. However, they’ve been doing it against a citizenry that STRONGLY doesn’t want to be annexed. The Planning Commission and City Council have held meeting after meeting to listen to angry county residents who do not want to be annexed. Then, they went ahead and annexed the areas anyway. When persuasion didn’t work fast enough for them, they chose enforcement. Now the city is having to spend precious money to fend off two (so far) lawsuits from angry residents.
2. The city has forced one business (a gas station/convenience store) to remove an electronic sign and has tried to force Lamar Outdoor Advertising to remove a digital billboard. The city has an embargo against electronic signs, but in both of these cases, they had approved the signs that were put up. Now, they’re forcing these businesses to foot the bill for removing the signs. Once again, the city chose enforcement over persuasion (and reason). Once again, the city is being sued and has to spend even more precious revenue to fight off a lawsuit.
3. Recently, a local car wash was forced by city officials to remove a U.S. flag they were flying. It seems the flag violated the city’s ordinance on how large a flag could be. Apparently, the car was owners were too patriotic. Again, the city chose enforcement. It was only under massive outrage by citizens and a small protest at the car was site that commission members hastily amended the flag ordinance to allow the flag.

In all of these cases, the city has handled the PR on these issues terribly. Instead of helping citizens to understand the issues (or rescind the rules if they were just nonsense), the city has chosen to stubbornly stand their ground and use enforcement instead. And they’re losing in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. Losing badly. Sometimes, being right isn’t enough. You need to appear to be right. In marketing, perception is frequently truth.