Cookie, Oh cookie,
How you taunt me,
With your fiendish taste,
Your devilish charms
- Anonymous
I can eat a whole pan of fresh cookies if I have enough milk to smooth their passage, and if the wife isn’t home to witness the carnage. I’m not proud. Not ashamed either. Just another helpless victim of the all-mighty mixture of chocolate chunks, butter, vanilla extract, egg, flour, sugar, and baking powder.
Apparently, a couple of billion dollar corporations have tapped into the power of the cookie as well, and they’re using it to create competitive differentiation in their markets. The New York Times has published a nice piece about how DoubleTree Hotels and Midwest Airlines have baked cookies into the fiber of their business strategies, and how the strategies are paying off.
I can imagine a competitive differentiation strategy brainstorm at a professional services firm; the “let’s align around the cookie!” plan might not end up with the most votes. Yet it’s working for DoubleTree and Midwest. Here’s why it does, and how you can cook something up that might work for you.
First, differentiation means different things to different people, and the concept is usually over complicated. For the purposes of our discussion, think about differentiation as the process of distinguishing one thing from another, and that the usefulness of differentiation is to create buyer preference. (If you’re curious to read more, we’ve written quite a bit about differentiation in articles such as The Myth of Being Different and in our book Professional Services Marketing.)
So how does the cookie fit in? It creates emotional resonance.
Travel can be exciting, boring, frustrating, infuriating, invigorating, and so on. The process of travel creates a slew of emotions as does the goal of travel (e.g. win a business deal, go on a family vacation, visit an ailing relative, sneak away for last minute fun in the islands).
Whether the traveler realizes it or not, emotions are in play big-time during travel. Enter cookies, stage left.
Power of the Girl Scout Cookie: It’s that Girl Scout Cookie time of year. As you can see from the cookie-pie chart above, Girl Scout Cookies serve to enrich the lives of girls around the globe and support our military forces. We at Wellesley Hills Group encourage you to buy Girl Scout cookies from a local troop or to send them directly to U.S. service men and women.
As DoubleTree puts it:
Cookies are warm, personal, and inviting, much like our hotels and the staff here that serves you.
Brilliant. Travel can be many things, but it’s not often personal, warm, and inviting (especially now). The cookie is the antithesis of the travel experience—a calm gooey harbor in the mist of the travel storm.
However you’re feeling, the cookie is likely to make you feel better. That’s the crux. And as a consumer, you are likely to remember this, thus creating a lasting impression of and preference for the brand. Now will that preference work with everyone? Surely not, but none of us at our companies should be trying to appeal to everyone anyway.
It’s our charge as service firm leaders to create a service experience that people value. That’s what Midwest and DoubleTree have accomplished with the cookie.
Here’s how to make the same concept work for you.
Realize that the cookie is the frosting, not the cake. (Author’s note: unless it’s a whoopie pie because then it’s both, but that’s not important right now.) Your value at your company may be in the ROI you create for clients as measured in hard revenue and profit. It may be that your service delivery will succeed in advancing the client organization where others have consistently failed.
Often this should be the case. But, just because the value is in the ROI you produce doesn’t mean emotions are not in play as they are in travel. Strong business results translate to success, career advancement, financial freedom, and peer recognition. Failed engagements mean career challenges, lack of respect, financial constraints, and fear of competitors getting further and further ahead.
The cookie is a symbol that works to elicit specific feelings from people in the Midwest and DoubleTree target markets, and to associate those feelings in the minds of the consumers with the companies themselves.
The question you must ask yourself is, “What feelings are associated (or do we want associated) with the process and outcomes of working with us?”
Then your tasks are to 1) find a symbol that represents and elicits those feelings powerfully, and 2) make sure you achieve the intended impact with your symbol.
In the first instance, you have to pick the right symbol. Consider the longstanding—but now defunct—relationship between Tiger Woods and Accenture. Tiger Woods was perhaps the most powerful representation on the planet of consistent delivery of high performance. You’d be hard pressed to find someone that didn’t know him and his on-course success. A perfect fit for Accenture’s “High Performance. Delivered.” message.
When Tiger’s public perception changed, the symbol was no longer a good fit. The relationship ended.
In the second instance, you have to achieve the impact. The road of marketing is littered with professional services firms who spend years defining their value and then choosing some kind of symbol to represent that value to the market. But then they don’t:
- Make the symbol a part of their internal culture. Impressions of service companies are delivered largely through client facing teams. Don’t make the symbol a part of the lives of the delivery teams and you can kiss impact goodbye.
- Craft a powerful experience to deliver the message of that symbol to the intended recipients. Imagine DoubleTree’s chosen symbol is a cookie, so they post pictures of warm, gooey cookies (rather than actual cookies) around the hotels. Right idea, weak (or even detrimental) impact.
- Create the necessary volume of touches to sustain the connection of the symbol to the company. Impact fades if you don’t reinforce it.
- Deliver the symbol consistently over the long-term. DoubleTree guarantees cookies will be waiting for guests on arrival 24 hours a day, and has been on the cookie path since 1986.
Commit to your cookie and it will work, but if you’re not ready to get behind it for the long-term, don’t start baking anything at all.
 LinkedIn |
 Facebook
|
 StumpleUpon
|
 Buzz |
 Digg |
 De.licio.us
|
5 comments »