“Will It Blend” was a genius idea from Blendtec, kicked off with a $50 budget in 2006. The campaign saw Tom Dickson’s videos go viral and take a boring blender manufacturer into the pantheon of marketing presentations. They have 187 videos on YouTube and 845,000 subscribers to their channel. So far, their YouTube channel has had 294 million views. Not bad for a blender maker duking it out in a red ocean of blender suppliers.
I suggested to a client of mine that they take a leaf out of Blendtec’s playbook and do the same for their boring drill bits. Being my client, I actually never used the word “boring”, but at least floated the idea for them. “Will It Drill” I thought could be a goer for them, however they never went for it. Instead, they keep doing the same old promotions using catalogues of products with potential buyers.
Another client of mine is an equipment manufacturer, and I came up with a suggestion for them. They get a lot of calls to their call centre for help with running the equipment. These calls often come from part-time staff in the stores who can’t understand how to use the machinery or fix simple issues. They are not well trained and with the difficulty of recruiting staff only likely to get worse, the chances of them getting better trained are fairly remote.
I suggested that they create a series of “reality TV” style tutorial videos for the 20% of the problems which make up 80% of the calls to the call centre. This would relieve the call centre staff of boring, repetitious work. It must be extremely hard to tell someone over the phone how to fix machinery.
You make the videos once and so the investment is able to be amortised over many years, because the machines don’t change that much and the issues are probably the same all the time.
This means no scripts and low production values. Initially I thought to get a real technician in the company’s technician uniform, to go through the 12 steps or 7 steps or 5 steps or whatever, to fix the problem. Edit the video well, to make it easy to follow and put this up on YouTube and on their website. When people call in with these typical issues, the call centre staff can just direct them to the videos and say “call us back if you have any further problems”. The chances of that will be very low I would guess. This was an elegant solution, I thought.
Then I had a further thought and a more radical consideration. I wondered about going a completely different direction from reality TV to Hollywood. Given the people in the stores are not technical people, why not get someone who is also not technical to walk them through the steps, so it is more accessible? There is a local foreign businesswoman here I know, who does a lot of MC work for luxury products. She is really beautiful, really blonde and speaks excellent Japanese. That would be a killer combo for this job in Japan. I would also dress her up in an evening gown, with her hair done perfectly, to accentuate the tinsel town glamour. Get her to point out what needs to be done step by step. It is a counterintuitive approach and may even go viral like Blendtec.
This got me thinking about how we present what we do. Are there some areas where we can think in a differentiated way about how we present our solutions to potential clients? What about for your business? What are you doing now and what could you do if you really considered something innovative and differentiated? We all get into a rut of the same old, same old about how we present our brand and our solutions. Year after year, we do the same thing and probably basically the same approaches as our competitors.
Blendtec has shown how to take a very dull, utilitarian solution and make it sexy. My “Will It Drill” client never took any action when it wasn’t so difficult. For whatever reason, inertia took over, and he is still working hard to sell drill bits in a crowded market. He can only differentiate on price, which is not something any of us want to do.
I don’t know if my client will go for the glamourous blonde Hollywood bombshell solution to fixing common requests for help from clients, but I hope he does. I am also thinking now about how do I take my own advice and what can I do with my training business? How about you? Has this article stimulated any would be Blendtec marketing innovations for you?