Start With Why

easily won. Repeat business, however, is. All it takes is more manipulations.
    Manipulative techniques have become such a mainstay in American business today that it has become virtually impossible for some to kick the habit. Like any addiction, the drive is not to get sober, but to find the next fix faster and more frequently. And as good as the short-term highs may feel, they have a deleterious impact on the long-term health of an organization. Addicted to the short-term results, business today has largely become a series of quick fixes added on one after another after another. The short-term tactics have become so sophisticated that an entire economy has developed to service the manipulations, equipped with statistics and quasi-science. Direct marketing companies, for example, offer calculations about which words will get the best results on each piece of direct mail they send out.
    Those that offer mail-in rebates know the incentive works and they know that the higher the rebate, the more effective it is. They also know the cost that goes along with those rebates. To make them profitable, manufacturers rely on the breakage and slippage numbers staying above a certain threshold. Just like our trusty drug addict, whose behavior is reinforced by how good the short-term high feels, the temptation to make the qualifications of the rebate more obscure or cumbersome so as to reduce the number of qualified applicants can be overwhelming for some.
    Samsung, the electronics giant, mastered the art of the kind of fine print that makes rebates so profitable for companies. In the early 2000s, the company offered rebates up to $150 on a variety of electronic products, stipulating in the fine print that the rebate was limited to one per address—a requirement that would have sounded reasonable enough to anyone at the time. Yet in practice, it effectively disqualified all customers who lived in apartment buildings where more than one resident had applied for the same rebate. More than 4,000 Samsung customers lured by the cash back received notices denying them rebates on those grounds. The practice was brought to the attention of the New York attorney general, and in 2004 Samsung was ordered to pay $200,000 in rebate claims to apartment dwellers. This is an extreme case of a company that got caught. But the rebate game of cutting out UPC symbols, filling out forms and doing it all before the deadline is alive and well. How can a company claim to be customer-focused when they are so comfortable measuring the number of customers who will fail to realize any promise of savings?

Manipulations Lead to Transactions, Not Loyalty
    “It’s simple,” explains the TV infomercial, “simply put your old gold jewelry in the prepaid, insured envelope and we’ll send you a check for the value of the gold in just two days.” Mygoldenvelope .com is one of the leaders in this industry, serving as a broker for gold to be sent to a refinery, melted down, and reintroduced into the commodity market.
    When Douglas Feirstein and Michael Moran started the company, they wanted to be the best in the business. They wanted to transform an industry with the reputation of a back-alley pawn shop and give it a bit of a Tiffany’s sheen. They invested money in making the experience perfect. They worked to make the customer service experience ideal. They were both successful entrepreneurs and knew the value of building a brand and a strong customer experience. They’d spent a lot of money trying to get the balance right, and they made sure to explain their difference in direct response advertising on various local and national cable stations. “Better than the similar offers,” they’d say. And they were right. But the investment didn’t pay off as expected.
    A few months later, Feirstein and Moran made a significant discovery: almost all of their customers did business with them only once. They had a transactional business yet they were trying to make it so much more than that. So they stopped trying to make their service “better than similar offers,” and instead settled with good. Given that most people were not going to become repeat customers, there weren’t going to be any head-to-head comparisons made to the other services. All they needed to do was drive a purchase decision and offer a pleasant enough experience that people would recommend it to a friend. Any more was unnecessary. Once the owners of mygoldenvelope.com realized they