The Basement

While at the WOMMA Conference, I told anyone who would listen about what a lousy job Volkswagen is doing and how they could stop the madness with a single phone call. For those new to my blog you can read the back story here, here, here, here and here but here's the summary:

• I spent 2 hour on the Volkswagen website and was ready to buy a Jetta Wagon TDI

• I went to my local dealer, Brad Noe Autoplex, and the sales person ruined any change of me buying a Volkswagen in about 4 minutes

• I blogged about it and emailed both the dealer and VW

• The dealer responded and appologized, VW did nothing

• I called the VW Customer Care Center and complained for 30-45 minutes. I learned that the car that I "built" on the website wasn't actually avaiable and was in fact out of production.

• I blogged these events

• Two weeks go by and I forget about it. Then I notice someone from VW.com visits my blog 68 times in 1 day.

• I posted the title "Hey! You at Volkswagen, Stop Reading My Blog & Go Fix Your Web Site!"

• I then found an form email that they had sent me a couple of days earlier that prompted me to call their Customer Care Center – which I had already done over a week prior. I blogged this.

• Most recently CMO Magazine wonders why Volkswagen won't call me.

Now new information... somebody at VW has hit my blog another 116 times. Still no one from VW has contacted me. I think this is because they're scared to engage. This is one of the things I learned at WOMMA. Large companies are really struggling with how to deal with negative online comments. So they are having meetings and discussions and drawing org charts – in the mean time, bloggers are calling them clueless, arrogant morons. In fact...

The guys at Volkswagen are clueless,

arrogant morons.

Now, do I really think that? No, of course not. But if I did, what would they do about it? If history holds, nothing. This is the worst possible response. I think that anyone that reads my blog on a regular basis knows that I'm a pretty rational guy. I'm just as likely to say great stuff as I am to say bad stuff. Those that I've said bad stuff about, usually end up really liking me. So why not engage me?

At this point I don't really care about the car, as I've said, I've already ordered a Scion xB from Jim Norton Scion in Tulsa. And I highly recommend them – ask for Jared.

But what I do care about is the lesson: How should big companies – or any company – deal with negative online consumer generated media?

This was talked about a lot at the recent WOMMA Conference. I think the answer is engage as quickly as possible - honestly and openly and with respect. The Holy Grail marketing buzzword du jour is "engage." How do you get customers to engage you? Well how about you meet them half way.

This answer freaks a lot of companies out. The old-school model uses a well trained and placed spokesperson to filter all sentiment through a corporate speak filter. This strategy will fail miserable in the blogosphere. It turns out that lots of companies are monitoring – even Volkswagen has been to my blog almost 200 times – but why? Volkswagen has taught me that they don't care what I say and that they will take no action. Even if it isn't true and completely defensible.

All Volkswagens are made with child

slave labor in an abandoned

Daewoo plant.

See? Nothing. How about this...

Volkswagen online complaints are

spiraling out of control and they refuse

to address the problem.

Now here's another lesson, some things that online consumers say are, in fact, true.

As I said, while at the WOMMA conference I was telling anyone who'd listen about my Volkswagen experience. Now, keep in mind, the WOMMA crowd is marketers, market research folks, CGM analytics firms, ad agencies and producers of all sorts of products. What I found was that the buzz on Volkswagen is that they are in the midst of a quality crisis and that everyone is clamoring about it online – but more importantly, Volkswagen is ignoring the problem.

Kerri "Brand Soul" Martin
Director of Market Development
Volkswagen

In fact, their response was to hire slick marketing chick Kerri Martin away from MINI USA. In the last month she's fired long time Volkswagen ad firm Arnold and hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky. That's a $345M account kids. I expect someone at Arnold had a bad day over that. For those of you who don't read AdWeek religiously, CP+B is the firm that brought you the Subservient Chicken.

Volkswagen has no respect for its

prospective customer's attention.

"What the hell is the Subservient Chicken?" is the question on your lips if you aren't professionally involved in marketing. Yes, marketing folks, no on in the real world knows what the Subservient Chicken is. Why? Because it was a dumb campaign that was designed around the ego of the ad firm instead of the product it was supposed to be selling (Burger King, BTW). In fact, Eileen Campbell, President, Global Development, Millward Brown (major global market research firm) used the Subservient Chicken as an example of a buzz WOM campaign – which she says is a bad thing.

Volkswagen plans ad campaign with

Paris Hilton sucking chrome off tail

pipe of a Jetta.

Not really - but Volkswagen's plan for fixing product quality and customer satisfaction is to spend more on advertising with a firm that tried to sell hamburgers with a guy dressing in a chicken suit on the internet which no one, except marketing people, remember. Which, in my opinion, is worse than the Paris Hilton bit. Am I missing something?

Hey guys at Volkswagen, how about this idea – build a better product, spend money on making sure your actual customers feel like they kick ass. Then fix your damn website and make sure you can actually provide the products that you advertise on it. Traditional advertising is about awareness – you don't need this, people know who Volkswagen is. The problem is you piss them off by the time they are ready to buy – or worse just after they buy. This is not an advertising problem, this is credibility problem. All the advertising in the world won't fix this problem.

I'm no genius, but I know how Volkswagen could be $345M more profitable next year.

See, all of this could have been avoided if someone at Volkswagen would have just picked up the phone and said, we're sorry, we're addressing the problem right now. The moral, of course, is get over your stodgy corporate self and engage... and quickly.

On a related note, I'm currently hit #5 for "Volkswagen Sucks" on Google.

Alrighty, I've been spending lots of time emailing folks I met at WOMMA (I'm not done yet), but I wanted to start posting some more detailed coverage of the event before the buzz wears off. (Read that any way you like.)

Based on several conversations, I gather that lots of folks came to the WOMMA conference on an investigatory mission – Should we join? (Yes you should.) What's up with this WOMM stuff? Who the hell is that Matt Galloway guy? How do I implement a WOMM strategy? What does a real implementation look like? Can you really get results? How do you measure ROI? etc.

As I have said, all of the speakers at the WOMMA conference were great. This is not just lip service although I can understand how one might be skeptical, but trust me on this, they were all great. But there was one in particular that I felt really answered the hard questions with real-world, rubber-meets-the-road poignancy. And if you were there and left even one presentation early, you missed it.

Gaylene Nagel, Head of Lifestyle Marketing for Electronic Arts presented her WOM Case Study: NBA Live 2003 vs. Sega 2K3 as the last speaker of the day.

The slides are available on the WOMMA site but they don't really do the presentation justice. Here's the short version...

• EA's product was measured by some game industry standard and was considered to suck in comparison to the Sega product.

• The previous year Sega outsold EA 2:1.

• EA was getting negative press (and resultant WOM).

• Sega was expected to outspend EA marketing 2:1.

There were lot's more challenges, but you get the point. Gaylene and her team developed what I would call an influencer focused WOM campaign. They started by finding a remarkable feature – the "Right Analog Control" and they renamed it to something catchy – "Freestyle Control." Then they focused on the intersection of hip-hop culture and professional basketball and they hit the streets. Instead of buying worthless ad space, they put the games in the hands of rap artists, DJ's and professional athletes. Instead of mindlessly handing out crap at trade shows, they made limited production runs of Nike basketball shoes and M&N jerseys and gave them to folks like Nelly, Fabolous and other influencers. They help hip-hop events and blurred the lines between their game, real basketball, hip-hop and the culture that surrounds them.

In short, they stopped marketing to the masses and focused on the thought leaders and trend setters of their audience. Then, they didn't market to them. Instead, they played with them. Instead of interrupting their influencers lives, they enhanced them. Instead of trying to trade money for attention, they did something remarkable, they traded attention for attention. So fundamental, so brilliant.

Gaylene understands passion. In her younger life she moved to Maui, because that's where the best wind surfing is. Later she migrated to the mountains as she entered the world of snowboarding. She understands what it means to be so irrationally connected that nothing else matters. EA is smart enough to let Gaylene share passion with other people. Passion, it turns out, is contagious. That's remarkable and it's exactly what a WOMM campaign looks like.

So, did it pay off?

• NBA Live 2003 outsold Sega 2k3 3:1.

• Despite lower ratings & competition price cuts, NBA Live continues to outsell Sega year-over-year

I love this case study for several reasons. First off, it largely happens offline – most of the focus in the space is online and sometimes this fact derails the conversation (But nobody know what a "blog" is? etc.) Second, they used real traditional sales metrics to show ROI – and it returned big. Third, Gaylene was not bashful about stating that EA's product was rated as inferior. She starts the presentation with this fact and gains instant credibility. Transparency, authenticity, and sincerity are so important – perhaps the most important things - and they are the things most attendees at WOMMA seem to be most scared of. "How can we be publicly critical of ourselves and still expect to win?" This is, of course, the wrong question. These folks should ask: "How can we not be publicly critical of ourselves and still look honest?" Well, you can't.

One aside, from the audience during the Q&A session, George Silverman clarified that industry metrics graded EA's product as inferior – but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was inferior. Mr. Silverman added that this was ultimately for the consumer to decide – not the industry soothsayers. If one measures superiority at the cash register, clearly, it's Sega product that fell short. Excellent point.

Thanks Gaylene for your honesty and for the great presentation!

DISCLOSURE: Gaylene has the distinct honor of being one of only two WOMMA attendees to hug me. But I liked her presentation best before that.