Ant Hill Marketing

Time to make the donuts.

As if it weren’t already difficult to select the perfect donut at the shop, Dunkin Donuts launched an online campaign, engaging customers to create the next, best donut. Sweet. While the concept isn’t necessarily original (taken from many a marketing playbook like developing the next M&M color, the next HaagenDaz flavor, etc.), it is engaging and like a single donut, makes you want more. With the dangle of $12K for the winning donut, it’s all but assured that Dunkin will get many a creation.

This type of effort helps highlight why engaging your brand with both your internal and external audiences is so vital.  Engaging both employees and customers energizes and invigorates both the brand and the people around you. It gets people excited. It helps build evangelists who continue to support your brand. Dunkin Donuts has more than 460,000 fans on its Facebook page and more than 11,000 followers on Twitter.  They also have YouTube channel.  And minus a few downfalls with this effort – website isn’t mobile friendly – it is fun. This promotional effort is part of a $100 million national campaign developed by Hill, Holliday in Boston, American Runs on Dunkin. Time will tell how many donut creations they receive but the endearment and trust they build with customers is worth much more than the next donut creation.  Unless of course it’s filled with chocolate kreme.

We recently evaluated a handful of email marketing services to use for our agency and settled on one we felt had the basic capabilities we need, Constant Contact. So, I went online to sign up. The website offers a a free trial, but suggests you call the 800 number if you are ready to buy. OK, I’ll do that.  But, the interactive voice response system asks you to hold for a communications consultant (what is that?) and doesn’t give an approximate wait time. After 3 minutes, I decide I’ll contact the company through email and ask them to call me to set up an account. The “incident” emails I receive say that could be 1-2 days.  Not fast enough for me.

At that point, the company had given me three negative brand touchpoint experiences. It made me question the quality of their product and what kind of support I’ll get once I’m a customer. Maybe it was the name that gave me the impression it would be quick and easy to sign up. Plus, as an active online purchaser in both my business and professional life, I have a few expectations of how the process should work.

On the positive side, a customer service representative did contact me in about 3 hours and I signed up with the hope I’ll discover the brand’s value to my company. But, how many prospects or customers are they losing because the sales process is not set up to deliver what people expect?