Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

From Yucky to Yummy: A great marketing tool

Stopping in to Walgreens to pick up a prescription today, I noticed something new on the counter...the Yucky Medicine wheel. This is one of those devices that you turn to find out information about each of probably 50 or more medications listed on the outside of the wheel. In this case, as you turn the wheel, it displays the Yuckiness Factor for each liquid medication in terms of taste.

The three choices in taste ratings (complete with emoticon-type icons) are:

• Yucky tasting
• More yucky
• Most yuckiest

For each medication, there is a second round of displays that indicates what additional flavorings are available to be added to the medication to make it more palatable (i.e., some are available in cherry and lemon, others in strawberry or pineapple, etc.).

Now we all know that there is no such thing as a good tasting liquid medicine--blechh! The folks @ Walgreens and the flavoring company have embraced this fact and turned it into a marketing tool. Instead of official-sounding, rational taste rankings like mild or moderately offensive, they go right to yucky and more yucky. Who can argue with that?

The goal is to convince patients and their parents to spend a few dollars extra to have a pleasant tasting flavoring added to their liquid medicine. (Medicinal flavorings are usually not covered by medical insurance, but paid for out of pocket.) What's a couple of dollars when you face the choice of feeding your child 10 days of most yuckiest medicine, three times a day?

BTW, the pharmacist told me that many adults take liquid medicines and they too try to avoid the yucky factor. So this marketing tactic works for adults as well as kids.

Great marketing, Walgreens. Makes you almost want to raise a medicine  stopper and say cheers! Well, ALMOST.

That really WAS easy!

I placed a small order online with Staples yesterday. Expected delivery in 3-5 business days. It showed up on my doorstep today, less than 24 hours from when I placed it. This was free shipping, too--not any kind of expedited extra-charge delivery.

There are a couple of key points here:

• Great customer service really does make you stand out from the pack
• Set expectations lower, then when you exceed them you look great. (If they'd told me it would be here in 24 hours, I'd have been skeptical and disappointed if they were late).

Hearing Good Things About Bose

We hear a lot of negative customer interactions, so it's always a pleasant change to hear someone talking about a great customer service interaction.

This comes from Chad Barr, President of CB Software in Shaker Heights, OH:

I love my Bose QuietComfort2 Headphones product and won’t use anything else in first class due to peer pressure.

When I first broke it about a year ago, the local store immediately exchanged it for a new headset - no questions asked. When breaking this new headset again several weeks ago, I had to send it to Bose Corporation since the local store did not have them in stock. I just received my brand new headphones from Bose, no questions asked.

Voting Process Made Easy...for real!

I have been a permanent absentee voter in California for years and years. That way I don't have to worry about where I am on election day, getting to the polls by a certain time, etc. The ballot comes in the mail, I fill it out and return it and everything is set.

Until this year. Somehow I managed to lose my absentee ballot. Actually, I think I may have thrown it out. Here I was less than a week from the election, past the deadline to mail my ballot and ensure it would be received, and dreading the thought of having to go vote in person.

Luckily I live in San Mateo County, where the county government has made these things straightforward and simple. I called the voter registration number (which I found via Google), and told the person on the other end I'd lost my ballot. She said I had 2 choices: go to my normal voting place (which I've never been to and don't know where it is) on election day, or come down to the voter registration headquarters in Redwood City anytime between now and Tuesday and vote there.

I was amazed at how simple and automated the process was at County Center in Redwood City. My first thought walking in to the assessor's office/voter registration office was how clean and neat and organized it was. Real estate related files are all neatly catalogued on cassettes, the mounds of paper that were likely present in this kind of operation previously have all disappeared, and all the service centers in the office are neatly marked. The woman @ the absentee voting station was pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful. She looked up my information on her computer, had me sign an affidavit that I had lost my ballot, then offered me the choice of using a paper ballot or one of the computerized systems they had available.
When I said I'd never used their system before, she said, well it's quite simple and I can walk you through the whole process without a problem. She then proceeded to demonstrate how the system worked (which really IS quite simple and intuitive). It took me about 5 minutes to go through the ballot, highlighting each candidate or initiative to vote for, then I was asked three times to confirm my choices (and given the opportunity to change them), before the ballot was officially cast. I got a receipt with a confirmation number corresponding to my ballot and I was done.  Total time from when I walked in the door until I walked out: less than 7 minutes.

It was actually really simple, effective and efficient. When is the last time you said those words in conjunction with local government? In fact, the most difficult part of the whole process was finding parking in downtown Redwood City.  Well, some things never change...