Fiesta Movement - Will it Catch On?

I was driving along the other day and saw a lime green Ford Fiesta - a car which is not currently available in the US, but which launched recently in Europe. It’s combination of good looks, driving fun, and low prices has quickly made it the second-best-selling car there after the Golf.

Ford is planning to bring the Fiesta to the US in 2011, an excellent move, as we need more good “economy” cars here that are not boring and/or ugly. Ford is doing an interesting viral/social campaign ahead of the launch. It has engaged 100 “agents” to drive the cars around and blog and tweet about their experiences (the car I saw was evidently driven by one of them - it had a fiestamovement.com logo on the back bumper).

80,000 people volunteered to be agents, according to MarketingVox:

The online program has also generated 6 million YouTube videos, 740,000 Flickr views, and more than 3.7 million Twitter impressions to date, according to the company. Additionally, name awareness for the model has risen to almost 60%, according to Jim Farley, Ford’s vice president of marketing (via the Detroit News).Ford will officially debut the 2011 Fiesta model at the Los Angeles Auto Show today.

Each round of agents produces videos that combine into “chapters” that will play out over the following months. It’s the most extensive social/viral based marketing campaign that automakers have yet undertaken (good enough to get me to write about it anyway), and shows the importance that Ford is placing on the Fiesta. According to the Detroit Free Press:

The Fiesta represents a seismic shift for Ford. The automaker, best known for its F-Series pickups and SUVs, hasn’t sold a subcompact car in the United States since it discontinued the lackluster Aspire in 1997. What’s more, Ford hasn’t sold a car with the Fiesta name since 1980.

Ford said it will offer 15 technologies in the Fiesta that are not typically found in subcompact cars. That includes keyless entry, pushbutton start and its Sync wireless communications and entertainment technology.

RIP Jeanne-Claude

Jeanne-Claude, wife and collaborator of Christo, died today suddenly of a brain aneurism at age 74.

I met her once, at a talk she and Christo gave at University of Chicago in 1997. I didn’t know that much about them at the time other than a passing familiarity with some of their more well known pieces. I expected a snooty, aloof, artier-than-thou character. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They were two of the most humble, down-to-earth people you could imagine. They financed all their big projects through sale of prepatory drawings and sculptures. They never took donations or corporate funding. Most of their pieces took years and decades to come to fruition, and each only lasted for two weeks.

Leslie and I saw their Gates piece in Central Park and it was a wonderful experience. (Pictures I took at it are in the slideshow above.) We were lucky to score a room overlooking central park on the 23rd floor, so had a birds eye view before and after it was opened, as well as strolling around. Unforgettable.

Good User Experience Starts with Good Employee Experience

A few years ago I was enjoying brunch with some friends at the Tavern at Lark Creek, which is rightfully known for excellent food and attentive and friendly service. Part way through the meal I had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. The bathroom was up some windy stairs, and was very nicely appointed, even more nicely treated than the dining room itself. As restaurant bathrooms go it was very pleasant, but I did not give it much thought.

At the end of the meal before hitting the road for a slightly long drive, I decided to make another pit-stop. This time I saw a downstairs bathroom, which was not as nice as the first one I had used upstairs (thought it was not by any means unpleasant). It became clear that I had taken a wrong turn the first time and had used the employee bathroom.

I could have chosen to be miffed that the restaurant didn’t ensure that the guest bathroom was as good as it could be. Instead, I realized that the quality of the employee bathroom was one sign that the restaurant cared for its staff, and recognized that taking care of the EX - the employee experience - is a prerequisite to a consistently high quality UX - user (customer) experience. They realized that “customer centric” does not mean ignoring employees. In fact it’s just the opposite, if you want to offer truly good service to customers, you need to start with treating your staff right.

As Olive Garden President David Pickens puts it, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

When you look at the company’s that consistently deliver superior UX - Zappos, Amazon, Google, Southwest, Starbucks back in the old days, Levenger, Niemen Marcus, the one thing they all have in common is that they pay huge amounts of attention to the quality of life of their staff, creating a culture and infrastructure of training that help their staff do the right thing, even when there isn’t an exact rule about what to do in a novel situation.

As an extreme example, read the letter that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote to employees when the acquisition by Amazon was announced. It is manically focused on the culture of the company and the worklife of the staff, superseding just about every other concern. “Culture” shows up 23 time in it, 7 times in association with “unique”, and 21 times with “brand”. In other words, Hsieh makes an intimate connection between the internal culture of the company and the external brand as it appears to customers - he recognizes that the EX is directly correlated with UX.

New York's Taxis and the Power of the Nudge

An NY Times article illustrates the large effects that can accumulate from small nudges that influence behavior:

[T]he back-of-the-cab swipe has emerged as an unlikely savior for New York’s taxi industry, even as other cities’ fleets struggle to find fares in a deep recession.

Overall ridership and revenue have increased. More and more fares are being paid with credit cards, even for shorter rides. And tips for drivers, usually an early casualty of tough times, are up sharply, double over the pre-plastic days.

…

The increase in tips, however, may have less to do with New Yorkers’ generosity than with the preset amounts suggested to passengers on the taxi’s software systems. In many of the city’s cabs, riders are offered options for their tip depending on the length of the ride. For fares under $15, a screen prompts tips of $2, $3 or $4; the numbers can range from 15 percent to 30 percent for higher fares. The presets are used about 70 percent of the time, according to industry estimates.

This perfectly illustrates the notion of giving people “nudges” - little hints about how to behave - and how influential this can be, even when it’s quite transparent as in this case.

The key was making the credit card experience much easier than the usual pain-in-the-neck that it is in other US cities, where the driver reluctantly drags out an old-school mechanical swipe reader, or rubs your card with a pen on a carbon paper receipt.

Although New York was late to bring credit cards to cabs, it leapfrogged ahead by pioneering a customer-friendly system that required no signed receipts, no minimum payment and an interactive device that let passengers swipe the card and add tips themselves.

This has opened up credit card use for short trips. Like Las Vegas’ use of chips, the detachment from physical cash “lubricates”, shall we say, people’s willingness to part with their money.

Once considered a convenient payment method for longer trips, often to the area’s airports, credit cards are now being used for shorter, cheaper rides, the type of $5 rainy-day indulgences that were once handled exclusively with cash.

Amos Tamam, president of VeriFone Transportation Systems, whose card readers are in 6,700 cabs, or about half of the city’s fleet, said his company’s average credit-card fare is now less than $15, down from $16 a year ago.

“The more usage you get with credit cards, the lower the average ticket is going to go,” Mr. Tamam said.

Read more >

The Psychology of Healthcare Reform

The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it’s so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty. 

A few years ago I was fortunate to work with a couple of organizational consultants, and they introduced me to the concept of NICs and PUFs. These funny sounding acronyms give insight into why healthcare reform is so difficult for many people to support. (And once you have this shorthand for thinking about scenarios, you find ways that they apply in all aspects of life.)

The two acronyms, and their counter parts PICs and NUFs, refer to the likelihood that something will happen, whether the impact with be positive or negative, and how quickly the impact will happen.

PICs: Positive, Immediate and Certain. This is the best case - a good impact will be for sure happening to me soon.

NICs: Negative, Immediate and Certain. This is the worst case - a bad impact that will surely happen, and right away. People instinctively avoid these as much as possible.

PUFs: Positive, Uncertain and Future. Something good may happen, but if it does, it will be in an indeterminate future, and I don’t really know how good it will be if it does happen.

NUFs: Negative, Uncertain and Future. The opposite of course, that something bad may happen at some point in the future, with an uncertain degree of bad-ness.

Applying these to the healthcare debate, they clearly illustrate why there is resistance to reform.

The consequences of reform in terms of money-out-of-pocket, quality of care, and choice of care are all unclear for most people, naturally so since the changes are complex. It’s therefore unclear whether the changes will be positive or negative in nature. Depending on one’s financial situation, job security, and satisfaction with current healthcare service, one may be inclined to see the change going more in the positive or negative direction.

The battle over the public option partly revolves around whether people will get bumped off their existing plans and onto a government plan. This would represent potentially a large scale change, and again may be seen positively or negatively depending on one’s circumstances. But when that switch may happen is unclear. Would the introduction of the public plan cause an immediate sweeping change as employers dropped their private insurance for the public plan, or would the status quo hold? Since this is unclear, people have differing opinions about how it will play out.

People who see PICs in healthcare reform obviously support it - they think it will bring positive changes, quickly. This may be because they stand to gain personally, or see immediate benefits for those who are currently under- or uninsured.

People who see NICs are against reform, believing that it will have immediate negative results, whether for themselves or others.

PICs and NICs are going to be hard for politicians to sway as they are pretty entrenched in their positions (anchored by the Certainty and the perceived near-term consequences). Immediate impacts, whether positive or negative, often have a more powerful influence than ambiguous longer-term ones. That’s why dieting is difficult - immeidate pleasure of a cupcake now vs possible ambiguous connection to expanded waistline later. It’s also why saving is difficult - the benefits in the far of future feel less compelling that buying the latest gadget or trinket today.

It’s the PUFs and NUFs that are the swing votes in the healthcare debate, and here we are tending to see the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” dynamic playing out. With something as literally life and death as healthcare and insurance, the glass-half-empty NUFs tend to outweigh optimistic PUFs. If there is a chance of a negative result that you can’t define or predict, then it can seem safer to stick with the status quo rather than hold out hope for an ambiguous improvement at an indeterminate point in the future.