Brandon Coon

How to Lose Market Share…in 10 days

Lose market share, why would I want to do that.  I don’t know but apparently some companies are all about it and they’re doing it by making their products and services hard to obtain.  Enter COX Communications.  They supply you with ESPN, CNN, and the hundreds of Hannah Montana and Laguna beach replicas.  They are going to lose their market share because they don’t value their customers.  During a phone conversation trying to get cable access to my new home the man was very friendly and noticed my 2 year history of never a late payment no balance left on the account at my old house, which he then affirmed was very good and that i was a good customer, so good i would not need to leave a deposit this time.

After checking the records at the new house, it was in “collection mode” or something real serious sounding like that.  So you know what he “TOLD” me to do, (I hate it when people tell me what to do) gather documentation go to a physical location (in a part of town i’m never in) and tell them your story, and by the way you cant get internet its not available in “your part of the city” (I live in the middle of OKC and the neighbors on both sides have this internet that is “not available in my part of the city.”  The problem with this comment is that he took no regard for the fact that I might not have time to take an hour plus to go to some place to prove to them I am not the person who didnt pay their bills last time.  No thought of prior payment history, no willingness to let me send someone documentation, nothing.  And when I told him i would just get service from someone else he said “ok bye.”

Policies are good guiding principles and this is one the Cox had that is probably a pretty good rule most of the time.  But we have to be flexible when dealing with our customers because no two are the same.  Never assume your product is superior enough that you dont have to serve the customer.  We should follow the rules our companies have set, but we must make it easy for our customers to access our products, because if we dont, someone else will.

Success & Authenticity

A wise man once told me one of the greatest paths to success is to hire people smarter than you.  Well I twisted that statement a little and chose to work with someone smarter than me when we formed Brandswag about a year ago.  I’m not sure what his strategy was for partnering with me but congratulations to Kyle Lacy for being quoted on the Wall Street Journal’s Blog. And he did it by being authentic.  A brand without authenticity is no brand at all.  So when building your brand be creative, draw inspiration from others, but most of all, make sure it is a direct reflection of you.

360 Moments

This past weekend I finally received my MBA and with it one of the most important lessons that the only thing an MBA gives you is a license to continue a lifetime of learning.  We should always be looking to learn the most we can from the situations we encounter.  One of my great professors, Dr. Burt instilled in me the attitude of learning and that the most successful people are those that are willing to learn from any and every kind of person and situation.

I learned today however that that is only half, ok maybe 70% of the story.  There are also moments that we are called to teach.  One of the biggest issues with learning is that we slowly become experts.  Why is this a problem many ask?  Well in Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath outline the disadvantage experts have because they have forgotten what it is like “not to know.”  At this point we have a hard time relating to our audience because we absurdly assume that they possess the same information that we do. We should be proactive in these moments in first realizing that we must understand the other persons point of view and then answer the call to inform others about the situation.  This can be monumental especially in the world of philanthropy.  Never stop communicating the vision, because it probably does as much for us as it does for our audience.  And I often need to remember that among teaching we never do away with our desire to learn, we simply add another layer that might be teaching.

No Wonder They Dont Understand!

Because even I don’t listen to what I’m saying.

I’ve been marveling, almost preaching for the last couple of months about a piece Seth Godin wrote about in his blog last February called The Posture of A Communicator . He successfully communicates (these two words rarely go together) that the responsibility of clarity, inspiration, eagerness to listen relies solely on the shoulders of the person doing the speaking, writing, drawing, etc., not the person on the receiving end.

I made a comment today that was taken completely wrong. But since i had been so inspired by this piece you know what i did? I blamed it on them anyway. "How could they take it that way, why would someone even think i would say that?"

After an hour of anger and accusation, i slowly realized my own stubbornness and foolery. At this point I realized that we need to make sure we are not only teaching others new things and learning new things ourselves, but we often need to remind ourselves the things that we failed to completely grasp the first time.  If I don’t even understand (and showing it in practice) then how will others?

Put Their Name In Lights

I switched dry cleaners today. Why? They remembered my name. My dry cleaners was not open the morning i had to have something cleaned for whatever reason. I dropped off my clothes to a different cleaning company and when i returned later that day to pick up the clothes, the woman behind the desk called me by my first name. I was blown away. I had been there ONE time. Thats all it took and all it takes for us to gain new customers, friends, coworkers etc. Dale Carnegie spoke on the importance of calling someone by name saying "to that person their name is the sweetest sound in the world." Make it a point to remember someones name, even in a business as unexciting as a dry cleaners you’ll create loyal fans.

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