Marketing with integrity / Five ways your company can use blogs / More caregivers suing employers / Restaurants add wireless internet

MARKETING WITH INTEGRITY
Lynn Upshaw’s book is filled with real life examples of companies that have built brand loyalty with authenticity, as well as companies that haven’t. if you follow his blueprint, you can’t help but succeed in building authentic relationships with your customers, relationships with integrity that will last.

The author’s model for Practical Integrity is pure simplicity:

Customer strategy: Be the one customers can count on
Product strategy: Market products that embody your personal integrity
Competitive strategy: Win the credibility race
Value strategy: Use trust to drive value
Promotion strategy: Promote honestly and non-invasively

Then stick with all of this, regardless of market changes or competitive circumstances, to create sustainable integrity, recommends the author, who also quotes a 2004 study:

“80% of U.S. consumers believe that American businesses are too concerned about making a profit and not concerned enough about their workers, consumers, and the environment.”

Upshaw’s profiles of several companies that let their beliefs about the world around them influence how they market to that world, including Trader Joe’s, Herman Miller, Infosys, Patagonia, and Kiehl’s Since 1851, are fascinating. As the author says, “Name any company in any business, and it probably can learn a thing or two from these companies. If nothing else, they teach us that scale is not as important as commitment, differentiation can be created by integrity, and marketing is most persuasive when the marketer lets the customer do the marketing.”

Other great take-aways from the book include:

Loyalty is created when customers believe they can rely on what is being promised.

Integrity is at the root of the respect customers have for brands and companies, and it is often integrity that prompts those companies to respect their customers.

Product integrity has to have a genesis in someone’s personal integrity.

Customer commitment and potential user interest can evaporate quickly when the integrity of the company or brand comes into question.

A company’s or brand’s integrity is the ultimate “product” that is for sale, even though it must be marketed more subtly than standard product features.

The companies that have mastered the artful science of relentless promise-keeping are always at an advantage, whether in good times or bad.

Pick up Lynn Upshaw’s book. It’s a great course on a really meaningful way to market.

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FIVE WAYS YOUR COMPANY CAN USE BLOGS
Blogs -- user generated websites -- are all the rage today, and a business blog should have a specific purpose. Here are a few ways for your company to harness the power of a blog:

1. Corporate newsroom: Get the word out about company news, provide industry updates, and allow discussion of these events amongst blog readers. Example: The Google Press Center.

2. Product blog: Release new product information and encourage feedback from the product's users. Example: The Yahoo 360° blog.

3. Event promotion: Create short-lived blogs leading up to a major event or promotion, to provide updates to attendees. Example: SoCon07.

4. Thought-leader blog: Establish yourself and/or your company as a knowledgeable authority in your field. If you provide useful information, then readers will think of you when the time comes to buy, or to search for jobs, or any other behavior you'd like to encourage. Example: Jason Warner of Google.

5. Internal blogs: Some of the most useful blogs will only be available within the company. Use blogs to allow employees to collaborate and share information. Example: Adobe.

Be creative, and you'll see many ways in which blogs can help your company spread the word. They're very useful tools -- able to share just about any message, to any audience, anywhere there is Internet access.

Source: marketingprofs.com

For more articles like this about blogs, see The Benefits of Business Blogging and Expand Your Repertoire with a Corporate Blog

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MORE CAREGIVERS SUING EMPLOYERS
More and more employees today have obligations outside of their jobs as caregivers, either to elderly or disabled family members or to children. And as these employees seek to marry their obligations at home to their responsibilities and schedules at work, many feel that they are being discriminated against, and are suing their employers.

This issue, which is termed "family responsibilities discrimination," arises when employees allege that they were not hired or were retaliated against because of caregiver responsibilities. According to the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, lawsuits such as these have risen 400% in the past decade.

Most plaintiffs are those who must care for a child, elderly parent, or disabled spouse. They require the flexibility to meet these obligations under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and cannot be discriminated against on the job because of the need to meet these obligations.

These lawsuits generally occur when:

an employee must care for a disabled relative and feel they were not accommodated with the flexibility to do so,

employees claim they have been denied leave to care for a child, or retaliated against for taking such leave, or

gender inequity is alleged, such as when women with young children claim they have not received the same treatment that new fathers receive.

Source: USA Today

For more articles like this about employee benefits, see Benefits Communication Builds Trust, Legacy Costs a Problem for Ford, and Nine Critical Trends in Benefits

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RESTAURANTS ADD WIRELESS INTERNET
It's no longer unusual to visit a Starbucks and see several customers drinking Cappuccinos while surfing the internet using laptops. Coffee shops -- as well as many hotels, airports, book stores, and other public places -- are increasingly offering free broadband "hotspots" for wireless internet access. All you have to do is to turn on a laptop that has a Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) card installed, and you're up and surfing.

Now, Wi-Fi is spreading into the restaurant business. Quickserve restaurant chain Krystal recently added free Wi-Fi to its 433 restaurants in the Southeastern U.S, and we've recently seen Wi-Fi in our own Toledo, Ohio Burger Kings. In early October, McDonalds announced that it would add free Wi-Fi to its 1200 locations in the U.K. The addition of service for both chains results in an initial net cost to the company as customers are not required to pay to use it, but both hope that the prospect of free broadband access get customers to stay longer to work and play online -- and to order some more food while they're at it.

The "hang out" nature of McDonald's and coffee shops would seem to make them a natural fit with Wi-Fi, but what's perhaps more surprising is that the wireless trend has moved beyond the quickserve and casual market. Consider establishments like Trapeze, a fine dining restaurant in Burlingame, California, which added Wi-Fi back in 2005 to attract a larger "business lunch" crowd. Executive customers at certain tables could open laptops while eating leg of lamb, finding yet another way to get more work done in less time.

The verdict is still out on whether fine dining and laptop usage will be a good mix -- in the judgement of Miss Manners.

Source: www.laptopical.com

For more articles like this about restaurant trends, see Gen-Y Drives Foodservice Trend and Dishing it up at Cereal Cafes