Since I started blogging I have also started subscribing to & reading other parenting-related blogs, from both mother & father bloggers.
One of the posting-threads I picked up whilst reading was this story at Inside Fatherhood –“Graco thinks dads are stupid”
In short, Inside Fatherhood relayed on how Graco’s packaging had the slogan “Ask moms who know”, as if implying dad’s know very little, or only very little participation in child-related product selection & purchasing.
To Graco’s credit, they picked up on the story (I think unprompted), and Inside Fatherhood got a response from them.
This makes good marketing- they have indirectly got me (another blogger) commenting on it already, effectively spreading the word on their response. All the way in Malaysia, no less.
Objectively speaking, in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia where I live, I cannot say I have had many such pleasant experiences of companies going a (few) steps further for the customer, during & especially after the sale. But as expected, the few who do tend to remain in our memory for years to come- at least for me.
The retailer from whom we bought the baby cot & stroller was one such experience. He was a sales person there, & if I recall correctly, he was serving another couple at the same time as us. Perhaps the other couple showed less interest, because our buddy was giving us a demo of what both the baby cot & the stroller could do (I blogged about how our cot had a few “stages” to follow the child’s growing needs). On these 2 products, he was riding it, standing & bouncing on them, folding / collapsing them; just to show the toughness & versatility of them.
Needless to say we did end up purchasing the items.
Another experience, though not parenting related, was from a furniture retailer. When we married we bought a teakwood bed & matching wardrobe. If you know your woods, you know teak is one heavy natural resource. The wardrobe was to go into our bedroom. Since we live in an apartment, getting it in & up into our unit was already a battle. The delivery guys were about to leave after assembling the bed & delivering the wardrobe into our unit (not our bedroom) when the store owner, Phil, asked where we’d like it. To cut the (unrelated) story short, he helped remove the wardrobe doors, helped chisel away our doorframe (because it was too tall!), moved the wardrobe into our bedroom with his musclemen, went out to get some wood putty (I drove, of course) to fix the doorframe, screwed the wardrobe doors back on, & polished the wardrobe a little, before leaving some 4-5 hours later. All for nothing.
By the way the guys were from the Midvalley branch of Homelife. And we didn’t even buy the furniture from this branch; we got it at their warehouse sale out in Sg Buloh.
~~~~~~~
I should add that this, & all previous posts to date, are not paid posts. As my accompanying personal photos can attest, these are products that I already own & use.
So it isnot the product that sells but the salesman that is important!
I think what makes the most impression to us is not the middle proces of buying the product but the end of the process.
And this end usually comes when the salesman makes his last pitch or the assembly man leaves…so our satisfaction lies in their hands more than the product itself!
The product satisfaction comes throughout the years of usage!
Thanks for the mention and for sharing your experience.
It’s often difficult to discern why one product is different (better or worse) from another. A little bit of extra attention from a company or sales person makes all the difference in making your decision. They can often point out something you hadn’t seen or considered and give you a new perspective and attitude.
Thanks,
Bill
I think this post make a pretty good point. I know from my own experience that I will buy a product from somewhere I know and trust – someone that has previously given good advice etc – regardless of the price. I will definitely pay that little bit more for service (but often the places with the service are the cheaper owner / operator places anyway)
Thanks all for your input.
I agree that a product’s features & functions are important in a buying decision, but for my example of furniture, & especially a bed, you can’t squeeze in more than what its original purpose is! Granted the mattress is made of space-age foam, will not collapse, etc etc…!
The reason why they left an impression is because of that extra length AFTER the sale was already made.
But “marketing” by definition is “knowing & then giving what the customer wants”, roughly. The baby product retailer had to assume we didn’t know what a product’s features were, & subsequently did the right thing in highlighting them to us.
In terms of Graco, they made a mistake in identifying their customers. Here they limited it to just moms, excluding dad’s like us!