Greetings Baer Facts besties, here's what's happening now:
20 Must-Read Marketing Books From the Past 20 Years 📖
A big honor to be included in this list of the best marketing books of the 2000s, featuring my book Youtility.
Make Your Email Faster and Better ⏩
My friends at TimeToReply are increasing customer satisfaction by 50% or more in many cases. How?
By providing a super easy and powerful tool that tells you how long it's taking your people to reply to emails from customers or prospects.
I love TimeToReply. So much so, that I set up a deal where you can get an entire month for your team at no cost (and it's inexpensive anyway).
Loved doing a video podcast (catch it on Youtube) with Scott Martin, talking about specific ways to know if your company is meeting customer expectations around speed.
When Customized Gets Creepy 🙀
A mountain of research shows that customers like us want their interactions with companies to be personalized, customized, and increasingly bespoke.
After all, nobody wants to be treated like just a spreadsheet entry, whose only function is to get a company closer to their Q3 revenue goals.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning make it easier to tailor experiences and messaging to each consumer.
But the NEW problem isn't that customer interactions are too generic, it's that they are TOO customized.
🍔 McDonald's in Australia may have crossed the line.
Do they suffer from Borderline Personalization Disorder?
When you place an order with the McDonald's mobile app and use drive-thru to pick up, the giant menu board greets you by name.
A viral TikTok video demonstrating this new feature racked up 700k views and hundreds of comments, which are equally divided between praise and cringe for this personalization effort.
As Spinal Tap famously opined, it's a fine line between clever and stupid.
Which is it for you??
Note that consumers are allowed to opt-out of the menu board greeting, although comments suggest it's not intuitive to do so.
To me, this is just a nice gesture that confirms that McDonald's knows who you are.
But evidently, the customer's name also shows up on the screen of the drive-thru order taker, and the original idea was that they would speak that name when the car pulls up.
"Welcome, Jay. I see you've ordered a quarter pounder with cheese again. How do you feel about your life choices?"
THAT version would be too much for me.
I'm not sure why, but for some reason reading my name on the menu board is comforting. Hearing the drive-thru person say it is icky.
AI combined with 5G is going to make this kind of on-the-fly personalization easy to execute.
But at what point does personalization create a customer experience deficiency?
Without testing - and credit to McDonald's in Australia for doing so - it's hard to know where the line is, and when you've gone too far.
What examples of borderline personalization disorder have you experienced?
The Books Report
I worked closely with Jenny Magic for years.
Her new book with Melissa Breker is Change Fatigue: Flip Teams From Burnout to Buy-in
It's exceptional.
I deployed Jenny's brilliance for my biggest global clients, when they needed to make big changes in their operations, processes, or strategies.
Now, all that wisdom is contained in one book. AND, it's just .99 on Kindle this week.
If you need to make changes in your business, and your team just can't get around the bend, THIS is the book for you.
Jay's Faves
My son, Ethan, graduated college this weekend. As he embarks on a job search sure to include some obstacles, I made sure he watched this profound TED Talk from Jia Jang (who is also one of my fantasy football league mates):
What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection
10 million views and counting. It'll make you feel better about whatever has you down.
Over in Tequila Jay Baer land, I've got an exciting opportunity that I wanted to also mention here.
Mexchico is owned by Enrique and Bianca, friends of mine in Austin. They import amazing, hand-crafted products from Mexico including shirts, dresses, glassware, rugs, throws, pillow, ornaments, decanters, and more.
Perfect for Mother's Day, or just because. The whole catalog is 10% off and free shipping if you use promo code JAY10.
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