Fiat Lux
But it is about music.
One thing that technology has done to music is the decline of shared musical spaces. Years ago, it was habit for me to bring a boom box and a pile of tapes or CDs to the office & play music every day. Music was a shared experience — coworkers would bring in and trade CDs, vote some stuff on or off the playlist, even make office mix tapes. It wasn’t a paradise — especially when your co-workers had very different musical tastes — but it was more social.
Now, each of us sits at our desks plugged into our own private music streams. Nobody has to argue about whether or not [Band X] is good work music, or negotiate a preferred volume level — but also we’re more isolated from each other.
On the whole I’m not sure it’s a step in the right direction.
“Surprise and Delight” was one of the mantras we got trained on at Starbucks. The way Starbucks sees the concept, it was about doing what you needed to in order to exceed customer expectations — remaking drinks to make sure customers were happy, handing out samples, etc. When it’s done right, it’s a great way of building customer loyalty.
Someone over at wine.woot must have been paying attention, because today I checked my mailbox and found an envelope containing a bumper sticker and a little card that invited me to send them a photo of the bumper sticker in use to get even more “cool stuff”.
I’m at best a casual wine.woot customer. I’ve only bought from them twice. So I was definitely surprised to find a gift from wine.woot in my mail. And you know what? It worked. I certainly would have bought from them again, but I’m definitely going to be more diligent about checking the site regularly for their latest offering. I’ll probably put the sticker up somewhere; maybe on my car, maybe even on my laptop. And I’m blogging about the whole thing to boot.
Multiply that out by all the other customers woot sent this to, and for the price of a run of bumper stickers and some postage, that’s pretty good marketing. And good for customer loyalty too.
Bravo, wine.woot. Well played.