The reasoning behind giving little unexpected extras
I was in Montreal this week at the #140MTL conference. It was a tremendous event organized by Mila Araujo. In addition to speaking about “What’s Your Purple Goldfish?”, I had a chance to watch some great presentations from the likes of Mitch Joel, Sam Fiorella, Ric Dragon, Susan Borst, Ted Curtin, Judi Samuels, Renee Martinez, JC Little and Josepf Haslam. I always walk away from conferences inspired. Josepf used an amusing venn diagram that poked fun at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It sparked my thinking about the reasoning for giving little unexpected extras and the benefits of going the extra mile?
Here is a venn diagram showing how marketing lagniappe can affect strategy, culture and reputation:
The three benefits of G.L.U.E are:
- Differentiation – standing out from your competition. Differentiation via added value.
- Satisfaction / Retention – reducing churn. Physical manifestation that the business cares about its employees and customers.
- Buzz – giving customers and employees something to talk, tweet, blog and post to Facebook about.
Today’s Lagniappe (a little something extra thrown in for good measure) – Here’s a little backstory on Venn diagrams courtesy of Wikipedia:
A Venn diagram (first introduced by John Venn in 1880) is constructed with a collection of simple closed curves drawn in a plane. The principle of these diagrams is that classes be represented by regions in such relation to one another that all the possible logical relations of these classes can be indicated in the same diagram. That is, the diagram initially leaves room for any possible relation of the classes, and the actual or given relation, can then be specified by indicating that some particular region is null or is not-null.
