Categories: Articles

Hurts So Good

What do you do when a brand is so good no matter how bad it treats their customers?

While on vacation, I frequent a particular restaurant. It’s a basic health food restaurant (salads, smoothies, sandwiches, etc…) and everything is fresh and delicious (no kidding). The problem? The wait staff is terrible. To the point of embarrassment. The service is also slow (have you ever waited 45 minutes for a salad?). The owner doesn’t seem to care (I’ve seen this person have multiple fights with either customers or staff in the middle of the restaurant). If you head over to Yelp, you’ll see comments that not only agree with my sentiments but expand – in graphic details – on the challenges that this establishment faces.

Do you think this brand cares?

It doesn’t. They don’t respond on Yelp and if you complain at their location, they seem unaffected. How bad is it? I actually had great service there by one of the wait staff and when I told them how impressed I was, their answer was, "thanks… I know that we have a reputation for terrible service." Imagine that: the staff is letting their customers know that they have terrible service. On another trip, I did a take-out order (thinking that it might ease the pain). After having my order taken by a young woman who may as well have been doing her nails and speaking on her iPhone while taking my order, I wasn’t surprised that three items were missing. When I asked for them politely, she snarled back at me, "are you sure you asked for this stuff?"

The Soup Nazi.

It’s not a new story. The food is so good that we’re willing to endure the torture. Or – as one very prescient reviewer on Yelp says: "there have been times that I’ve tried to stay away (because of the problems with the service), but it’s just so good, I can’t! It’s like a bad relationship… the abuse hurts, but making up just tastes so good!" Brands are taught to remove as much friction as possible, but when you think about it (and, I mean really think about it), when the product is superior, you’re not only willing to let everything else go, you’re willing to endure actual pain. That’s the power of having a product that does more than simply doing what it’s supposed to do. As miserable of an experience that I have when I go there, the food overcomes every other aspect of the friction. There’s a lesson there for every Marketer: you can (literally) let everything else fall by the wayside when you have something unique (a non-commodity) that people want (and don’t care what else they have to go through). Amazingly, some brands do have their very own Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

I bet you thought this Blog post was going to be about Apple, didn’t you?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.