Be Useful, Be Real, and Be Nice?
- amymallen
- Feb 5, 2015
- 3 min read
Just last week, I happily shared my frustrations about grocery shopping with you and spoke about the positive experience I have had with the Buy Me a Pie mobile application (You can read it again here). What I hadn’t considered was one of my 3 Words for 2015: Relish. (And I quote: “Too few people take the time and effort to pause their hectic lives for just a moment and congratulate themselves on a job well done. Even fewer are truly appreciated by those around them. I think we could all use a little more relish in our lives.”)
What Now?
I had some pretty great things to say about this app, so I decided that they should hear about it. Although I am one of many (many) daily users of this app, I initially wondered how they would respond if I were to plunk a post onto their Facebook page for all to see, a virtual pat on the back. I’m sure I’m not the first (nor will I be the last) to congratulate them on being a useful brand that actually focuses on being useful.
Just before bed, I sauntered over to their page (which I hadn’t liked yet, shame on me!) and thanked them for being so gosh darn useful and for making my grocery shopping experience less painful. On top of that, I was always curious where their unique name comes from, so I asked! Within 6 hours, I got a lovely personalized note, complete with not one, but TWO smiley emoticons:
“Hello, Amy! Thank you so much for your kind feedback! We are really happy to hear that you like our app! As for the name, we wanted something funny and something that contains a call to an action. The first version of the app were for Russian market only, and the app name, literary translated, was (and is) "Buy a loaf of bread!" - that's what wives here ask their husbands to buy on their way back home very often. :) However such a name did not sound ok in English, of course. We liked the idea that the app name starts with "Buy", and after considering multiple variants we finally decided that "pie" is the best thing one may ask to buy :)”
Call to action? Marketing lingo? My kind of people! They are not just app developers, but are in tune with customer needs, being useful, and working with the fundamentals of marketing to apply them to the big, wide technological world. I love it! On top of that, they think globally. This is a part of the new box, folks, the world is now much bigger than our own little neighbourhoods.
Be Real
I received thanks, and a warm and genuine response that was thoughtfully created just for me. It was also timely, without a gap that (in some cases, not mine!) could have made me forget about making the comment in the first place and potentially disengage me. The short conversational story explained the name and gave me a window into the company history in only a few sentences. I'm not going to lie, I left that Facebook notification feeling special.
Be Nice
I just had to take it one step further (poke the box, my teacher would say). I thanked them (for thanking me I guess), and asked if they had written a blog post that could expand on their story. Of course they had, and you can read it here! Finally, I just had to put my own little plug in there (I am a marketer at heart), so I invited them to check out my last blog post to see what I had written about them. Who doesn’t want to see nice things written about them on the internet? There is not near enough of that these days. The end result within a few hours: “Hello, Amy! Wow, thank you for the review, it's really cool! We've shared a link to it in Twitter and Pinterest.”
So spread the love people, and let everyone who is doing a good job know about it. Not just classmates, coworkers, friends, and family, but today’s brands and companies. It is today's savvy consumers that will determine what today's companies put into the new marketing box.
Who do you think is doing a good job? Have you told them?
You never know, you might just get a little love back (like a Pin or a Tweet).
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