How to vacuum up PR, BrightLight RankFlux, and why a Dyson car wouldn't suck.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and thank you very much for tuning in. I've been an entrepreneur and a PR person for over 25 years. And on this podcast, I'd like to share some insights and some tools that I believe will help people that run and own their own businesses to get noticed in the same kind of way that big companies do. Now, speaking of a big company, one that I've admired for a long time is Dyson. Now, it just so happens that living here, we're living right next to James Dyson's land.

Now, actually, if you're living in the UK, that's not a difficult thing at all because James Dyson, or Sir James Dyson, the eponymous inventor of the Dyson vacuum and all manner of other vacuum air products, is the UK's largest So he has some 25,000 acres of land, which, to put that in perspective, exceeds the amount owned by the Queen, who only has 20,000 at Sandringham.

So James Dyson is an avid owner of land and really works the land too, buying and selling, and creates on his land renewable fuels that can power Up to 10,000 homes. But this is nothing compared to his manufacturing business, which has a turnover of approximately £3.5 billion. So Sir James Dyson is one of the great inventors of the UK. You know, frankly, I think he deserves both the title, the land, and all the other wealth that he enjoys, because we've recently become real converts to Dyson. And I share this because from a PR point of view, I think that he's done a wonderful job of creating a brand and a complete customer experience in a way that if you've got your own company, you might think about ways you could emulate. Now, it started for us when we purchased a hair product called the Dyson Airwrap in Hong Kong. Whilst on vacation at Christmas. Now those of you that know me will know that I personally am not the the person going to be using the air wrap, but I have two young girls and a wife who who the air wrap was an object of quite some desire for quite a long time. The number of times we'd stop in Boots and have hair done meant that eventually we would have to buy one, which we did. So we purchased this air wrap. In Hong Kong, and just after that, when we came back to the UK, we we bought the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the V7, and that's been a fantastic purchase as well. Recently, after about three and a half months, the V7 vacuum cleaner, which is one of these portable electric ones, ceased to exist, ceased to function, and we checked online. Customer experience was fantastic online, and I was able to file and record the problem with the vacuum cleaner. And then within five working days, I received a replacement battery. No questions asked. So I thought, well, I'll I'll just chance it and I'll register my Hong Kong Airwrap. But of course, it wouldn't take the serial number. So I wrote into the customer service, said we bought this Airwrap, but the the button on the on off switch has come off. I wonder whether they could send me a replacement part. I would fix it myself. But the, the lady in, in the, uh, Dyson said, no, no, we'd like to send you a replacement. Now this product is only 4 months old, but it's as good as new. We bought it overseas. I showed her my credit card receipt, and today we received the replacement. Now not only do we receive the replacement, but then of course I got an SMS saying that your part is on its way. And within minutes of the delivery driver taking pictures of me receiving my replacement air wrap, the email came saying, thank you very much, your new product from Dyson has been delivered. So from start to finish, this is a premium product where the packaging is great, the online experience is great, and the customer service has been exceptional. So it made me really think about what public relations does for a brand, is it creates opportunities for happy customers, as we are, to share and to voice and put reviews online. Now, I personally do that. I've done a few on, on YouTube and onto eBay and onto Amazon where I've used product and I've shared the value of it. Now, customer experience, as it's called, is, is really key in this new era of evangelism and customer sharing. Now, Paul Horahane, who's an expert in this area, a long-term friend, started off in direct marketing, but in Singapore he has just taken the business of the CX Academy from Ireland, and I listened in to one of their recent webinars because Once we've got customers, how do we retain them? And of course, in this era when there may be less new customers, retention becomes a great deal more important. So listening in on on Paul Horatane's CX Academy webinar, they talked about consumer experiencing delivering three benefits. One is the retention, retaining that customer like me who bought the vacuum cleaner, bought the hair dryer. I guess we'll be looking. For what else we can buy from James Dyson next.

But the better the customer experience, the more likely we are to not churn.

As in telco, they talk about total lifetime value, but also about the churn rate— how quickly consumers drop in and drop out of a, of a service. Then there's the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell. Well, of course, we had already bought the, the Airwrap, and so we liked that, and we liked the service that we received, so we bought then the vacuum. And we'd course be looking for the next product that Dyson brings out.

I don't think I need the Airblade dryers at home, but if I, if I did, I'd buy those.

And then of course the next part is evangelism. Loyalty and a strong customer experience create not just an acceptance for the brand, but people like me, we like to tell people. I'm even doing a podcast about it. So as we've seen with more and more of these online evaluation software companies like TripAdvisor, the, the Which? Report, for example, because consumers and customers and staff with products, services like Glassdoor on how well you're doing as an employer, the technology enables people to become either anonymous or named advisors to other consumers or members of staff. And I was talking with an American company trying to recruit staff in India, and a big problem that they had was that on Glassdoor and some local Indian websites, their brand wasn't known. They didn't have enough, enough employees in India to actually get any, any ratings to attract other other employees. And there's a great product developed by some British companies called mo.work. That's mo.work. And they have an employee engagement platform which we looked at because it helps consumers— sorry, it helps companies to create ways to engage with their staff wherever they're working, but it sort of gamifies it. It creates its own social media platform and enables not only communication but dialogue and engagement through rewards programs and employee loyalty programs, all online and through this enclosed garden. And the strategy that I was proposing was that as the employees start to share, for example, lifetime achievements, maternity awards, and so on, that that becomes the, the content for social media posts. Now, customer experience has now moved into the, the realms of PR, because for those of us that remember the Maytag advert, it used to be the guy sitting there waiting to receive a customer complaint. And of course, the advertising was that he didn't get any complaints. And but also, it used to be that if you got complaints as a company No one would even— would know, would ever now know.

But now on websites, we even have things like Trustpilot, um, being advertised on the website itself. There are some apps now where people can see how many other people are looking at the product. And you see this especially in things like holiday rentals, for example, on, um, on Airbnb and, and, um, and Bookit. So the, the appearance of customer experience and the reality of customer experience is bleeding over into PR.

And of course, as we see, if it is a bad experience, then what role the public relations plays is one of mitigation. So if there's a crisis, it used to be that a crisis would get into the media, mainstream media, and the job of the PR agency was to somehow either try and exact some force on the media to not cover that story, or in some cases, as Trump has done with Twitter, to withdraw advertising.

But that's not possible now where, where crisis management really has been disabled because of the democratization of communication through digital.

So if a customer experiences poor experience, either in a restaurant or at a hairdresser or at an industrial product or at a factory, they can now make that known themselves through multiple channels. So PR has to monitor for that and has to be able to monitor and mitigate those experiences by sharing positive experiences, or at least trying to counter that somehow.

And we see that in ratings, for example, on the app stores where consumers are leaving ratings for apps and the developers are responding almost in real time to the complaints or the, or the, the questions. Now, the opposite scenario is when a company is delivering outstanding customer service, much like Dyson has just done for us today. When the experience is fantastic, the consumer may tell people about that, as I, as I'm doing now, the agency ideally can capitalize on that by reposting, retweeting, or even reaching out to that consumer directly and having that consumer to become a spokesperson. And I noticed that more and more, especially during the COVID times, if consumers have had a great experience with a product, the brands are doing a hashtag for example, of that trend. And recently one of the, one of the brands was doing a hashtag, being a dad at home, and there were dads that were posting videos of themselves and it was sponsored by a consumer brand. So PR has access to control what people are amplifying and magnifying, and if you're lucky, then they're starting to get that into people's own websites. And so the, the lines are blurring between what was a corporate story And what was a consumer evaluation story? So how can you track this? Well, there are some applications, and there's one called Brightlight, brightlight.com. That's L-I-G-H-T. And no, sorry, Bright, B-L-I-G-H-T, which has got offices in Houston, in Riverside, California, Kyiv, and also in Brighton, of all places. Now, they just did a survey in 2019 because now we have over 40% of the world's population are active on social media, and they're spending apparently a staggering 116 minutes a day. That's nearly 2 hours a day for people online. Bright Light does some tracking of keywords and words being mentioned on platforms like Google. So they track daily the movements across 14,000 keywords on the search engines. They found that 90% of consumers use the internet to find a local business in the last year, with 33% looking every day. And 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses And 52% say they always read reviews before buying a product. So the average consumer reads 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business, and 53% would consider using a business with less than 4 stars. So in other words, if you don't have 5 stars, you've lost half of the market.

So these numbers go on. They all lead themselves to the importance of reaching out to your consumers.

Once the product is sold, that's really not the end of the journey. But in the same way, that's not the end of the journey once you've hired a member of staff. They have a voice, a very powerful voice, as we can see. So the, the stats can also be used if you want to do a survey. In the same way that I read this because it is a press release, you can also use surveys and statistics to create press coverage. So you can turn the data back into stories. Now, we used to work for a company that creates a cost of living index, and every year they would do a cost of living index about which city you can afford to move to, and it was done and paid for by and large by the HR departments who were managing the expectations of staff when they went to new locations. The data was always so hotly received by the media because of course there was competition amongst all of the cities and the countries to see who was ranking well. Of course, Singapore, where I was living at the time, was always delighted with the results. It was expensive but always ranked highly for safety and security for quality of life and education. Surveys, if you want to create them, can be 5 to 15 questions, and they can create up to 3 press releases for you if you question them, if you structure them properly. Now, one group that creates surveys and uses this to create content but also to create a business is JD Power. So looking at the JD Power rankings, they did a research and they found that James Dyson and his vacuum cleaners were the category winner.

So the Dyson vacuums, the upright vacuums, had a category score of 843, and that even improved from the prior year, which seems hard to believe.

But in the JD Power research It shows that brand research shows that higher satisfaction leads to higher recommendations. So nearly half of the upright vacuum cleaners researched a brand prior to going to buy one.

So whether you like it or not, people are researching online your company or your product well before you even get them to your website. Okay, so we've got that to contend with. And then what's important then is delighted customers, especially those that score above 900, which seems almost amazing, they will definitely repurchase the brand.

Okay, so if someone scores above 100 on the satisfaction rating of your product, they will definitely repurchase the brand. As opposed to the average value below that 90%, only 30 to 31%. So in other words, if you can delight your customers and your staff to that level, like James Dyson has done, then you're going to get them coming back and recommending. Now, I won't be using the Airwrap product myself, although I have to say it's made a handy stand for my new studio monitor. So I've enjoyed that. Which is great. They also ship in a very sturdy box. Um, but I did use the Dyson to hoover up the new studio, which formerly was the garden shed. And it's a shame that Dyson isn't launching his car in Singapore because then it would be perfect because I already live on the land next to his. I have the vacuum, I have the Airwrap, and with an office in Singapore, I could have purchased the car too. I'm that much of a happy customer. We even share the same name of James. Now that is clever PR. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please rate it, subscribe, and share. In the meantime, I pray that you have good health, wish you a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating.