Heed their feedback. It’s a warning.

Customers who complain are doing you a big favor. Instead of telling you that there is a problem, they could just go away mad—and tell all their friends.

Just because you have not encountered the problem yourself, that does not mean it is not real. It means that your interface, documentation, web design, or *something* is at fault, and you need to fix it.

And just because no one has complained before, that does not mean there has not been a problem all along.

Quit assuming that the customer is always wrong / stupid / lazy / dishonest. And even if you think that, do not let it show.

And the customer who is trying out a free service or product today (and complaining when it does not work as advertised) is not being “ungrateful.” Grow up! You’re in business.

That complaining, grouchy customer gave you a chance. They could have become your biggest fan. But you failed them.

Good marketers rise to the challenge, accept complaints as feedback, and make sure the customer is happy. That is how you keep customers and get new ones by referral. Sarcasm is not.

Sure, a grouchy customer could be just a mean person. Or they could be just having a bad day. And your product and/or inadequate service and support could just be the cause of that bad day.

So be nice. And pay attention. You could learn a lot.

Customers who speak up are valuable. And they are the tip of the problem iceberg. For every one who speaks up, there are lots more who simply leave in disgust—and tell their friends.

Think about it.

Defying marketing maxims about the difficulty of creating brand new markets for totally new products, Jobs has succeeded on a grand scale with products such as Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone…

And lest anyone think his success with Apple Computer was just a fluke, when Jobs left, the company foundered. His return brought the company back to success. Clearly he knows what he is doing.

But Uncle Stevie’s latest brainchild strikes me as a mismarketed product. It is a great product. I believe there is a large market for a tablet computer with great Internet connectivity at a reasonable price. Yet the iPad tablet computer is being marketed as a phone!

Too big to carry in your pocket, and too expensive, vulnerable, and heavy to carry everywhere, the tablet seems likely to fail in the cell phone market for those reasons and a few more. I hope I am wrong, because I really want one—but not to use as a cell phone.

At least that’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Example of a well-designed book cover. Image via Wikipedia

Awhile back I wrote about how you can judge a book by its cover and the importance of book jacket design in selling books. (The same could be said for most packaging design.)

As an example I used a nameless series of novels that had become highly successful with classy covers and then switched to unprofessional and rather repulsive cover illustrations—apparently to save money.

Last week in the grocery store I noticed a book from that series with yet another a new cover design. The illustration was midway in competence between the original sharp designs and the subsequent bad ones. However, I think the publisher finally got it right.

The books are a bit more serious than the original designs were. As I explained before, a cover that does not match the contents can turn off the intended audience and attract people who will put the book right back down again when they flip through it and see what is actually about.

The new illustration is attractive enough and gives a better idea of the content and tone of the series. Yay!

Needless to say, I bought the book.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Book Covers Uncovered (mediabistro.com)
• Penguin Press Design August ’09 (thepenguinblog.typepad.com)
• Michael Cho’s book jacket illustrations for Don DeLillo’s White Noise (drawn.ca)

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I wrote about how you can judge a book by its cover—and should be able to. At that time, I was talking about the appropriateness—or congruency—of the design to the topic.

(The Douglas Adams book on the left is an example of good design from a series that was well designed, well marketed, and highly successful, establishing a huge base of loyal fans and eager buyers.)

Today I want to talk about the recent trend to cheap, ugly art on book covers. It is really obvious in some of the genre book series I follow.

For example, a series of books starts out with classy covers that convey the true nature of the contents. The series becomes highly successful and profitable—perhaps not a best seller, but a solid income producer for the publisher, with a great future ahead as the series grows.

Then the publisher commissions poorly executed, even repellent art for the reprints. Does that make sense? Not to this former book publisher.

You see the real profit in publishing is in the reprints. The first edition of most books does not make much money. Between the advance to the author, the costs of printing and binding, and the huge discounts required by the major bookstore chains, publishers often do not break even on the first book in series.

But they know that as more books in the series are published, new readers will go back and read the earlier ones, and the market for the series begins to build. That is why you often see the first few books in a series in paperback only, then the series switches to hardcover with paperback reprints of the hardbacks about a year later.

If the series really catches fire, you sometimes see the earliest paperbacks reprinted as hardbacks for the die-hard fans who want a complete collection of hardbacks.

Now, if you are the publisher, reprinting the original books is just gravy. The editing, typesetting, book design, and art are all done. The book exists as negatives or printing plates that you can reprint cheaply, even piggybacking the print run with another book printing. Easy peasy.

What you, as a publisher, do not want at that stage is to redesign the cover of the book. That adds time, adds cost, and cuts into profits. So why do it? Ever?

One reason is if the cover art for some reason changed for the hardback series, and that was when book sales really took off. For example, if the series was never expected to be such a runaway hit, the original paperback covers might have been done by a low-price (and lesser quality artist). The new design may be selling a lot more books.

Or when the series unexpectedly takes off, and perhaps the audience proves to be a bit different from the expected one, a more expensive or more appropriate artist may be commissioned for the hardcover books—with great success. That seems to happen more with the many crossover genre books these days. Publishers and bookstores sometimes have a hard time classifying such books correctly as they guess what the most avid audience will be for the books.

Or when the book is made into a movie or a hit TV series, the publisher may want to capitalize on a new market of movie or TV fans. So the covers are changed to conform with the movie or TV series logo and ad designs.

A good example of that is the redesign and reprinting of the Charlaine Harris series about psychic waitress and vampire friend Sookie Stackhouse since the success of the TV series True Blood. Her bestselling books in that series have been reprinted with all new covers to appeal to TV series fans. That makes sense.

So it would be worth the expense to upgrade the cover quality to get more sales--or to change the whole look it to appeal to a new audience. But I am seeing the covers on reprints of successful books downgraded.

And here is the thing: I know for a fact that downgrading the covers from classy and sassy to cheap and tacky is costing them sales. I myself have skipped buying books in series I love because the cover illustration was so poorly drawn that it repels me.

I have been in publishing, advertising and marketing long enough to know that my taste in graphics is representative of the market as a whole. Bad packaging and/or ad design always reflects badly on the product.

I may not represent everyone, by my taste does conform to market trends pretty well. And unlike most consumers, I am aware of how the design, illustration and typography affect my reactions to products, including books.

So my question is this: Why would publishers spend the money do downgrade book covers from appealing to unappealing? What is going on here?

And with as many talented, aspiring artists as there are, why are major publishers using inept artists for something as important to sales as book covers?

If anyone knows what the deal is, would you please explain it to me?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hey Heyer! An Interview About Cover Art, and a Giveaway from Sourcebooks (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)
• Can a new publisher flourish? (guardian.co.uk)
• Time For A Cool Change (pubrants.blogspot.com)

You not only can judge a book by its cover, you have to be able to—for the book to sell well. Think not?

Imagine a hard-boiled detective thriller with a fluffy, flowery romantic cover. You think anyone who is interested in hard-boiled thrillers will even pick it up? Of course not.

Now think of a sweet, old-fashioned romance (barely hints at sex, innocent till marriage…Do they still sell those?) with a garish, words-only cover. Do you think a young girl looking for a blissful escape from reality is going to give that book a glance? Not even one.

Worse, if the romance reader buys the thriller by mistake, or the nonfiction reader accidentally buys the fluffy romance, they will be extremely unsatisfied customers. Angry customers. They will blame the publisher for misrepresentation—and rightly so!

The point of the story is this: Make sure your advertising and packaging appeal to the right market, and that the product matches the presentation.

I promise you it is well worth the effort. And misrepresenting your product is never a good thing in the long run.

So why make it so that only those who have the latest, up-to-the-minute versions of software installed can watch it? When you do that, you lose a lot of potential customers!

Unless your video is demonstrating the latest special effects game, software, or movie, and your audience is young, affluent geekboys, you don’t need the latest version of Flash, released 5 minutes ago.

Today I received an email with a link to a video touting an Internet marketing product. From past experience with the seller, this will be a talking-head video. It will not need special effects. Five-year-old technology would work just fine.

Yet here I am with a less-than-one-year-old state-of-the-art laptop, and I can’t watch it because I don’t have Flash 10.1.01.1.1.1….whatever. In case it’s not obvious, that’s bad marketing.

(Yes, yes, I stopped work, closed all 25 browser windows and some other stuff, and installed it, but most people can’t or won’t bother to do that.)

Most people are not running the latest version of anything. If they are using their computer at work, they can’t. Most corporations deliberately stay at least a year behind the latest—and sometimes more—they want to wait for the bugs to be swatted and the security patches to be available before they update their software. It saves support costs. 

Corporate IT departments also set up the computers so that users cannot install anything not provided by IT. That also saves greatly on support costs.

And most people at home do not have the latest and greatest. Many do not even have the latest operating system. Like the big corporations, they may feel “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Or, no matter how intelligent and well educated, they may not want to get into PC maintenance.  You would be surprised how many affluent people just buy a new computer every two or three years—just like the big corporations they work for or with—instead of installing new software all the time. Adults are often using hand-me-downs from their high-school or college-age kids!

So if you eliminate everyone (even executives) using corporate computers (including laptops), everyone who is too busy/lazy to update software all the time, and also those who are using older computers and possibly cannot run the latest version of, say, Flash, you have just eliminated a huge percentage of potential customers—whatever your product. 

Is that smart? I don’t think so.

There’s a reason they call it “the bleeding edge.” You’re bleeding profits.

What I purely hate is when they call me. Calling can be a good marketing tool, but it should be used very, very rarely and wisely. Marketers who call to give me a sales pitch get a quick brush-off, especially if they got my phone number under false pretenses.

I never agree to calls. And I’m not very nice when people interrupt my day or evening with a phone call. 

On the other hand, an on-line marketing genius named Howie Schwartz calls frequently, and I welcome the calls. Why? He calls as a reminder of his webinars that I’ve signed up for.

Howie’s are automated calls, and they are truly helpful. I tend to get busy and forget webinars, and I find his really entertaining and useful.

Now if everyone else starts doing that, starts imitating Howie and calling me to bug me about their webinars, I will probably just unsubscribe from their lists. 

So the moral of this story is, “Don’t bug people.” If you manage to wangle someone’s phone number, treat it as golden. If they signed up for email from you, stick to that unless they give you permission to call—and unless you are truly doing them a service. 

You will sell a lot more products by respecting other people’s time and resources. 

And that’s all I have to say about that.

So now there are two companies touring the ghastly exhibitions around the U.S., spending millions on prime time TV ads in each locality where they set up shop. Their real customers are museums with whom they split the cash.

Apparently a lot of people want to see these ghoulish displays, because they keep on touring, so somebody must be buying a lot of tickets.

Now, besides the hideous TV ads, here is the problem: Most of those bodies were bought from prisons in China, a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world.

In China you can be put in jail and executed for the “crime” of being a Christian, Buddhist, or Muslim or for belonging to the indigenous population of one of China’s occupied territories, such as Tibet, Mongolia, Turkistan. Get the picture?

Investigative reporters got to wondering where a corporation could get so many bodies. Few people donate their bodies to science. Nobody donates them to traveling exhibits.

So reporters asked the two companies where they got the bodies. One claims to have documentation showing that most of the bodies were donated—but, get this, there is nothing that correlates the actual bodies with the documentation. So, trust them, because they are good guys. Uh-huh. Sure.

What motive could they possibly have for unethically obtaining bodies? How about money, lots of it? They do admit that they buy some bodies from Chinese prisons but assure us that the families gave permission. Do you believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?

As I understand it, even in the United States, most Chinese families refuse to donate organs of deceased family members. It is strongly against their beliefs. Do you truly think the families of dead people in China would give permission for the bodies of loved ones to be exhibited in public? 

The other exhibition company simply says they buy the bodies from Chinese prisons. They do not offer any proof of the origins of the bodies.

China is very cavalier with human life at best. But when money is involved, do you think they do not at least speed up the rate of executions so that the supply of bodies meets the demand for them?  

As if the exhibitions themselves were not perverted enough, the origins of the bodies they use to make their money are somewhat dubious at best—and truly hideous to contemplate at worst. How many young Tibetan monks and nuns are we seeing in those exhibitions, for example?

It reminds me of the perverted and decadent entertainment in last years of the Roman Empire. This is marketing gone way to far!

Just because you can do something, that does not mean that you should.

“I would never do anything like that,” you may say. But many marketing practices these days cause suffering or death of humans, animals, and whole ecosystems.

Pay attention to the origins of the products you sell. Who made them? Under what conditions? Who suffers because of them?

In an Internet world, “I didn’t know” is no longer an excuse. Think about it.