Best Buy takes a page from 'Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's' to defy Amazon, and expectations...

Bloomberg just put up a terrific story about the way that Best Buy uses its front-line customer service staff to fight off bigger and richer rivals, like Amazon.

If you're a fan of Trader Joe's, you'll recognize Best Buy's secret -- which is to empower front-line customer service staff to do what it takes to make customers happy.

Even after all these years, I'm still surprised this sure-fire brand-building method is something of a secret.

Check out this great podcast all about Trader Joe's

I was flattered to be asked to contribute to this great podcast, sponsored by Zendesk, on the topic of great customer service. The first episode is, in fact, all about TJ's. Check it out and let me know what you think...

This episode is entitled "Beyond Cookie Butter: The secrets behind Trader Joe's great customer experience.

If Trader Joe's was a car, it'd be a Subaru (according to these guys)

How does TJ’s famous customer satisfaction compare to other brands, in other sectors?

The other day, my Google news feed led me to a story about how Trader Joe’s (and Wegman’s, another great grocery business) had displaced Publix as the customer-satisfaction champion in the supermarket category. When I tracked the story back to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, however, I learned that 2014 was the first year ACSI had questioned consumers about Trader Joe’s, so the results of the survey don’t necessarily indicate a change in the relative performance of TJ’s or Publix (which is also a chain that I respect.)

ACSI claims that the scores are comparable not just between brands in any one category, but between brands in different categories. With that in mind, I dug into their stats to learn how Trader Joe’s customers’ satisfaction compares to people’s satisfaction with, say, their cars or phones. The comparison was enlightening.

Trader Joe’s (and Wegman’s) scored 85 on the ACSI satisfaction scale. That’s epic. To put it in perspective, no airline got into the eighties last year. Even Southwest scored only 78. No major cellular telephone provider came close, either.

In the clothing category, VF came closest. The maker of Lee Jeans scored 84.

Of the major hotel chains, only Marriott cracked the ’80’ barrier, although amongst luxury hotel chains, Marriott’s Ritz-Carlton subsidiary beat out TJ’s with an 86.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple scored an 84—by far the highest among personal computer brands.

If TJ’s was a car, what car would it be? Subaru shares its customer satisfaction score of 85. Only Mercedes-Benz did better (although Lexus and Volkswagen were both within the margin of error.)

What about comparisons with other food categories, or other retailers? Well, Starbucks scored a paltry 76. I note that the highest score for all fast-food is “All others”. I.E., any small local fast food outlet will likely outscore any major national brand. That’s food for thought, eh?

Food manufacturers did much better. H.J. Heinz, Hershey, Mars, Quaker, Nestle, and General Mills all equalled or bettered TJ’s score. That supports my general theory that it’s TJ’s customer service—not products—that drives fan loyalty.

Among other retailers, Costco and Nordstrom put up functionally identical scores of 84 & 86, respectively. Amazon also scored 86—by far the best among web retailers surveyed, but they didn't ask about Zappos.

The ACSI web site doesn’t provide enough statistical background for me to tell you how significant a one-point difference in score really is. I suspect it’s not significant at all. Still, their brand rankings ring true. And one thing’s certain, TJ’s has built its incredible brand with far, far less advertising than any comparable brand, in any industry. If you want to know the secret of how they did that, you’ll have to read my book.

Thanks to Google, I found this photo of a Subaru in a TJ's parking lot while sitting at my desk in my pajamas. And yet, Google's own Customer Satisfaction score is well below Trader Joe's. Perhaps it's that we don't fear that, one day, Trader Joe's will actually rule the world as a dark and imperious overlord. (Just kidding, Google. I love you guys.)

Comedian's 'ode' to Trader Joe's: It's Narnia

One reason I know I'm right about Trader Joe's -- by which I mean, I know TJ's built its brand on the strength of those chatty, cheerful crew members -- is that TJ's corporate culture has entered American pop culture. Check out this bit by Gary Gulman, appearing on the Pete Holmes show. It's as if he read 'Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's' and set about turning into comedy.

Stuck in line at Trader Joe's? This guy wrote a charming essay about it...

In the produce section of Trader Joe’s store in the Chelsea section of New York, Karl Holman holds an eight-foot-tall sign that reads “End of Line.” It’s six o’clock on a Tuesday, and Holman is managing the line for the second time this shift. While customers test peaches for ripeness, Holman holds the towering metal pole aloft, making the banner’s orange and yellow lettering visible to anyone who gazes up from the shelves. For the next hour, the line’s end moved constantly.

Short and stout, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a grey Trader Joe’s T-shirt, the forty-nine-year-old Holman addresses a knot of stopped customers who are blocking traffic. “Are you ready to check out?” he asks. “Step right here.” Customers glance at his sign and then file into place.

As the line forms in front of him, he takes tiny backwards steps to keep pace with its telescoping end. His moving target keeps him in motion, and he marks it with the dedicated poise of a Beefeater at Buckingham Palace. 

Starting by the tubs of cut pineapple, he inches deeper into the produce area, backing past the baby carrots and fresh herbs, past the clear bags of salad greens, and, while smiling and greeting passersby with a “Hi, how are you?” he hooks around a freestanding rack of fruit before stopping near the entrance. In a few minutes' time he has traveled so far back that, without meaning to be metaphysical, he has transcended the proverbial end of the line and arrived at the beginning.

To read the rest of author Aaron Gilbreath's wonderful essay, and see more of illustrator Marc Pearson's cartoons of life in a busy Manhattan Trader Joe's store, check out Narrative.ly

A top-10 finish in Ad Age's book poll!

Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's finished 8th overall in Advertising Age's "Best summer marketing reads" book poll! Thank-you to the readers who noticed my title in the contest, and voted for it.

Give the TJ's brand credit where it's due: Vote on AdAge.com!

Advertising Age is running a contest to determine the best summer marketing read. Give Trader Joe's brand credit where it's due, but going here, and voting for "Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's".

I'll be honest with you; Ad Age doesn't make voting that easy (unless you're already a registered site user, you'll have to register.) But, if you choose to register by linking to your Facebook page it's a little easier, and Ad Age is not a FB abuser -- they won't, for example, insist on posting on your behalf. 

Please vote! Hey, it's Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's, it's not like you're casting a ballot for Anthony Weiner.

Chicago blogger blasts broccoli, castigates cashier for kidding with kid with kid's cart

A popular fitness blogger posted a funny rant on the Chicago Now blog, that you can read here.

The blogger, Traci D. Mitchell, is pretty astute; she's a careful reader of packaging, and was shocked to realize that her frozen broccoli had been picked & packed, and shipped frozen... from China. Regular readers of this blog--and anyone who's read my book--will know that TJ's carbon footprint is not consistent with its brand image.

I thought she was also on the money (and funny) when describing a painfully slow-but-cheerful checkout experience, involving a little kid pushing one of those cute half-size carts, accompanied by his doting mommy. That's the downside to Joe's policy--and brand strategy--of extending those employee-customer interactions. Although it works overall, when it fails, it drives customers crazy.

For what it's worth, Traci, those small carts drove me crazy when I was doing the 'cart run' out in the parking lot. They don't nest with the regular sized carts, and slow the process of returning the carts to the store. Eventually though, I realized that anything that extended the cart run was actually good for me; it gave me a welcome break from the madness of the store!

Lots 'o people love Trader Joe's. But not like Nico Lang

Millions of people love Trader Joe's. I wrote a whole book about how that happened. But Nico Lang -- whose work often appears on Chicago's NPR mega-station WBEZ -- has taken TJ's love to a new level, pledging to marry Trader Joe's.

I don't know whether Nico wants to marry the entire chain, or just one Chicago store. Or, if Illinois approves gay marriage, maybe he'll marry Joe Coulombe (though I doubt the original 'Joe' is up for it.)

In a long post on the well-written Thought Catalog blog, Lang rhapsodizes about the marriageability of Trader Joe's, comparing it favorably to such presumably marriage-worthy stars as Ryan Gosling and George Clooney.

Nico's essay may be tongue-in-cheek, but it's interesting to me that he makes a couple of points that I made in my book. (I'm not saying he listened to my interview on WBEZ, but he might have...)

You might think that we’re in the honeymoon period and that I can’t see your flaws, but I accept you — for whatever you throw my way. Is that price not correctly marked? Is the food not always as healthy and organic as it appears? You think that I just see food that tastes good and don’t think about the politics behind it? I know why I have to travel from my “diverse” neighborhood a half an hour by bus to get to you, and why you only seem to be located in “white” neighborhoods. I understand food deserts. I know what your deal is.

I’m ready for a real relationship with you, which means calling you on your bullshit and knowing that your parents (or society) made you this way. They screwed you up, but we get better when we help each other. I see the good in you and know that sometimes instead of throwing the food that has “gone bad” away, you donate it or leave your dumpsters open for garbage pickers to reduce your food waste. You’ve got some baggage, but you’re also a force for good in the world. You care.

What fascinates me still, is that Trader Joe's fans cut the chain so much slack, in exactly the way that we excuse flaws in our friends that we'd find totally irritating in strangers. When he says, "Is the food not always as healthy and organic as it appears? You think that I just see food that tastes good and don’t think about the politics behind it?" it's as if he's been reading this blog.

Nico has an idealist's view of marriage as something you work on. "Is the food not always as healthy and organic as it appears? You think that I just see food that tastes good and don’t think about the politics behind it?" The implication is, of course, that Trader Joe's will actually listen.

"We have to talk" is not something that Trader Joe's famously close-mouthed senior management is ever going to respond to...

Trader Joe's subject of misguided YouTube campaign

Consumers Union, the non-profit owners of the respected Consumer Reports brand, has ramped up its efforts to make Trader Joe's a flagship retailer, and break the addiction to large-scale 'preventive' use of antibiotics on U.S. industrial scale farms. 

 Working under the NotInMyFood.org umbrella, activists staged a media event last week at Trader Joe's first NYC store. That event is now the subject of this YouTube video:

   

The video's well-done, for what it's worth. But elsewhere on the NotInMyFood.org site, the Consumers Union folks mistakenly characterize Trader Joe's when they write, "We are calling on Trader Joe’s, a leader in environmentally conscious food sourcing, to help end a meat production practice that is a serious danger to public health."

I mean this in the nicest way, because anyone who's read "Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's" knows that, overall, I admire the company. But Trader Joe's has definitely not been a leader in environmentally conscious food sourcing.

In fact, Trader Joe's is not a vertically integrated company. All of the products sold under the Trader Joe's brand are outsourced. And since many of Trader Joe's suppliers are in the food preparation business, not the food-growing business, even those suppliers have no easy way of knowing whether or not livestock operators are abusing antibiotics.

Trader Joe's also has a famously lean head-office staff. Buyers simply don't have the time or manpower to police two layers deep into the supply chain. The company could insist that suppliers assure it that they, in turn, are sourcing meats that aren't loaded with antibiotics. But even that measure would be meaningless unless it was policed. And I can guarantee you that it will be a long, long time before Trader Joe's spends a cent on lab testing.

As I've noted in the past, Trader Joe's incredibly strong cultural brand makes it a lightning rod for this kind of protest. It's unlikely to work, and I doubt that it's causing its famously insular CEO Dan Bane any lost sleep.

PissedConsumer.com

I have a Facebook friend who called my attention to a web site called PissedConsumer.com this morning. His post wasn't about Trader Joe's. It concerned the art supply store Michaels, and the link was to the first of many pages of bitter complaints by Michael's customers and employees (along with a few tepid defenses of the chain.)

Out of curiosity, I typed 'Trader Joe's' into the site's search field, and saw that there were pages and pages of complaints that cited Trader Joe's, too. What was the difference? As I started to read the comments, it was clear that the vast majority of the complaints were about other stores and brands, and cited Trader Joe's as an example of doing things right.

This is a typical example:

If I eat more than a couple of handfuls of Fritos or Lays potato chips, I get sick to my stomach. I contacted the company, but they didn't follow up with what I must assume they thought was a personal problem. I found a nice solution however. Trader Joe's sells a product called, "Organic Corn Chip dippers". They are very much like Fritos, don't make me sick and are cheaper. I highly recommend them for Frito lovers who are affected in a similar way or who are looking for a healthier, possibly organic snack food with a great taste and texture.

The comments on PissedConsumer are another example of the incredible strength of the Trader Joe's brand. As an insider, I continue to be fascinated by the disjunction between the quality, value (and 'values' in the larger sense) that Trader Joe's delivers in its products, and the strength of its brand/devotion of its fans. The fact that the majority of references to Trader Joe's on the PissedConsumer web site are comments like, "From now on I'll go to Trader Joe's" or "This would never happen at Trader Joe's" just underline the reasons other brands would be well advised to 'Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's.'

Trader Joe's doesn't try to be all things to all people, but they do strive to keep the customers they do have, happy. Companies, like Michaels, that don't mind alienating existing customers have obviously never done the math on customer acquisition. It costs a lot more get a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer satisfied. And with web sites like PissedConsumer now in the marcom mix, irritated customers are more corrosive than ever.

Canada's marketing industry notices "Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's"

Back when I lived in Canada and worked in Canadian ad agencies, 'Marketing' magazine was read by everyone in the business. That's why I'm pumped that Marketing is reviewing "Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's" in the issue that comes out on Sept. 19.

In the meantime, the Marketing web site has a little feature they call 'What Trader Joe's Knows'. They asked me to provide my ten commandments of building a great cultural brand. Since I always try to over-deliver, I threw in one bonus commandment. If you want to read them, go here.

Costco's CEO: Trader Joe's is a model retailer

Costco's CEO Jim Sinegal is no stranger to alpha-beating retail. Yet when the investment site Motley Fool caught up with him in this video, he admitted to owning only two stocks: Costco and Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway.



What's interesting, though, is that when he was pressed to describe what he'd look for in a retail sector investment, he cited a privately held company, Trader Joe's! Sinegal's not the first investor who's wished he could buy a stake in the Albrecht family trust's cash cow, but there's no Trader Joe's IPO in the foreseeable future.

"I would look for the types of qualities that you see in a Trader Joe’s," Sinegal said. "That you’ve got a niche, that you’ve got quality products, you’ve got a quality organization, everything about that seems to suggest quality, including the people that they hire in their stores, and so it’s pretty easy to get turned on by a business like that."

As the author of "Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's", I'd add that it's a real bonus when the company sustains its most valuable asset -- its own brand -- on the strength of corporate culture, spending only a fraction of it's rivals' budget on advertising.

The good ship Trader Joe's, sailing the (air)waves

The local NPR affiliate here in Kansas City, KCUR, shot me an email yesterday saying, "We had a last-minute cancelation for our 11 a.m. show Up To Date. Can you come in and talk about your book for an hour?" I had a great chat with journalist/host Steve Kraske, which you can listen to by clicking the player below (or, if you want to listen on KCUR's own page, follow this link.)

 I was surprised when callers were more or less evenly split between rapturous fans of the brand and Kansas Citians who were left cold. The lesson in this is, if try to ensure that no one hates you, you'll also be ensuring that no one really loves you. One of the real examples of Trader Joe's genius is that the brand doesn't try to be all things to all people.

As I was leaving the station, Steve Kraske, producer Stephen Steigman, Mary and I chatted for a couple of minutes and it occurred to me that the closest Trader Joe's gets to what we in the ad business call 'brand advertising' is the radio ads the company runs in some markets.

Trader Joe's says that it carefully chooses radio stations that emphasize news, talk, classical and jazz music -- stations that appeal to customers with better-than-average educations. That made me wonder, why doesn't Trader Joe's sponsor NPR programs? NPR delivers that demographic/psychographic profile in spades.

If you're an NPR listener, and have heard local programming sponsored by Trader Joe's, please let me know when and where.

Five days to #1

Hey now. I was confident that over time, I could build an audience for Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's (yes, using some of the same techniques described in the book.) But nobody saw this happening.

Phew. It's been a hell of first week already, and it's not even over. First The New York Times' food maven Julia Moskin pointed to "Build..." in the paper's What We're Reading blog before she'd even finished the book.

Then, LinkedIn's Chip Cutter started a discussion about Build... by including it in the networking site's 'Social Media Marketing' update. 40+ commenters jumped in and I spent pretty much all day responding to them. It was a lively discussion. Steve Hall's Adrants (an AdAge 'Top 150' blog) also linked to TraderJoesSecrets.

Yesterday evening, while my head was spinning, I got an email from a friend pointing out that I was, briefly, in the top 2000 overall on Amazon, which is astonishing for a book that is about as far from Fifty Shades of Grey as you can get. Thanks Julia, Chip, and Steve for being early adopters! Now hopefully things will slow down a bit, so my marketing and PR plan can get ahead of the buzz...