Steve Robinson is the executive vice president and former chief marketing officer of Chick-fil-A, and he is one of this year’s keynote speakers at the International Convention Center Conference, October 1-3, in Atlanta, Georgia. At the conference, he’ll talk about leadership and marketing, so we asked him a few questions about these subjects.
You’ve been with Chick-fil-A for more than 30 years. What have you learned from your successes and mistakes in marketing?
1. Take cues from customers and be their champion.
2. Build a great brand only in the context of a great culture.
3. Attract great people who are better than you are at what they do, help them plan, resource them, and get out of the way.
4. Great brand building and marketing are seldom a function of fact based only decision making…informed intuition is required…particularly if you are trying to emotionally connect with people.
5. Great ideas are more important than size of the budget.
What are some challenges in marketing that you foresee in the next five years?
1. Pressure on short-term results…counter to the long-term view needed to invest in major trans-formational brand and experience building.
2. Related, data proof before any major new marketing or brand initiative…counter to building relational experiences and brands. Build your case from the customers’ perspective, not internal or financial only.
3. Temptation to think there is no role for traditional media…wrong!
4. Assumption that people will not pay a premium for genuine service.
What are some best-practice strategies for handling controversy?
1. Don’t engage in the “soap box” of social or news media…cannot win because you cannot control context or really connect with people.
2. Speak the truth ASAP to those you trust.
3. Related, is there a friendly advocate?
How has marketing changed since you began your career?
1. Marketeers now have the opportunity to shape the entire experience and messaging for a brand…and they should. Every touch point should be influenced or be lead by marketing.
2. Marketing should champion for customer-centered innovation, and thus, growth in the enterprise. Too many forces can stymy both.
What advice can you offer to students and young professional who want a career in marketing?
1. Work in customer facing jobs at an early age…learn how to deal with and delight people.
2. Learn early that you have to earn new opportunity and advance; no one owes it to you. Go the extra mile.
3. Work on developing written and spoken communications skills…must be able to sell and inspire others. Followship is more important than title.
4. Be willing to take informed risk in your career and on the job.
How do you want to be remembered?
I attracted great talent, gave them what they needed to excel, role modeled the behavior that deserved their followship, and I loved them for who they were. Most of all, I served them.
I mentioned yesterday in a blog post that taking a walk at work is a good way to reduce stress. However, there are other—and better—ways to take breaks at work to help with your energy, concentration, and stress.
In “Give Me a Better Break: Choosing Workday Break Activities to Maximize Resource Recovery,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, two Baylor University researchers surveyed 95 employees over a five-day workweek about their workday break habits. Breaks were “any period of time, formal or informal, during the workday in which work-relevant tasks are not required or expected, including but not limited to a break for lunch, coffee, personal email, or socializing with coworkers, not including bathroom breaks.”
The researchers—Emily Hunter, PhD, and Cindy Wu, PhD, associate professors of management in Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business—analyzed 959 break surveys, which accounted for an average of two breaks per person per day.
“We took some of our layperson hypotheses about what we believed were helpful in a break and tested those empirically in the best way possible,” Hunter said. “This is a strong study design with strong analyses to test those hypotheses. What we found was that a better workday break was not composed of many of the things we believed. ”
Here are some of the top discoveries from the study:
Mid-morning is the best time to take a workday break.
“We found that when more hours had elapsed since the beginning of the work shift, fewer resources and more symptoms of poor health were reported after a break,” the study says. “Therefore, breaks later in the day seem to be less effective.”
The best kind of breaks are the ones that involve activities that employees prefer.
“Finding something on your break that you prefer to do—something that’s not given to you or assigned to you—are the kinds of activities that are going to make your breaks much more restful, provide better recovery, and help you come back to work stronger,” Hunter said.
Taking “better breaks” offers increased job satisfaction and better health.
“Better breaks” are ones earlier in the day and doing things you prefer. When these types of breaks are taken, people experienced less eyestrain, lower back pain, and headaches after the breaks.
It’s more beneficial to take frequent, short breaks than long breaks.
“Unlike your cellphone, which popular wisdom tells us should be depleted to zero percent before you charge it fully to 100 percent, people instead need to charge more frequently throughout the day,” Hunter said.
(Image: Jonathan/Creative Commons)
There are several strategies to help avoid or mitigate stress at work, such as taking a walk, eating lunch somewhere other than your desk, or getting enough sleep. However, there’s another strategy that many fail to consider—focusing on the positive things that happen to you.
“If someone were to tell you to focus only on the positive experiences in your day, you might be annoyed,” Joyce E. Bono and Theresa M. Glomb wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “People tend to associate Pollyanna-type positivity with inexperienced managers trying to squeeze a little more work out of frontline employees, or with the ‘keep smiling’ wall posters in the call center.”
Bono is the Walter J. Matherly Professor of Management at the Warrington College of Business of the University of Florida, and Glomb is the Toro Company–David M. Lilly Chair of Organizational Behavior in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. They led a group of researchers who studied the association between daily events and stress and found that “naturally occurring positive work events and a positive reflection intervention are associated with reduced stress and improved health.”
The study asked participants to spend five to 10 minutes at the end of each day and write about events that had gone well that day and why those events had gone well. After three weeks, study participants’ stress levels and mental and physical complaints declined. Furthermore, when the participants focused on positive events, they had less stress job-related thoughts at home.
“This simple practice — writing about three good things that happened — creates a real shift in what people think about, and can change how they perceive their work lives,” Bono and Glomb wrote. “It can also create a feedback loop that enhances its impact: we believe that people who reflect on good things that happened during the day are more likely to share those things with family and friends. Sharing positive events with others creates connections between people and bonds them with one another, further reducing evening stress. Ultimately, this also improves sleep, which our ongoing research suggests leads to greater alertness and better mood — which in turn leads to more positive things happening the next day.”
(Image: mediamolecule / Creative Commons)
Whatsonstage.com conducted a ticketing purchasing survey this past summer to find out more about buying habits, such as how often people went to the theatre to how they booked their tickets to how much they were willing to pay for tickets. Approximately 3,200 people participated in the survey, with 91 percent of responses originating from the U.K.
The biggest discovery was that 23 percent of those surveyed said that cast members are the No. 1 influence on purchasing tickets. Ticket promotions accounted for only 13 percent in influencing purchases.
“This is probably a fair reflection of the rise in so-called celebrity casting phenomenon that the West End has witnessed in recent years including Bradley Cooper in The Elephant Man, Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet, Kevin Spacey in Clarence Darrow, and Dame Judi Dench in The Winter’s Tale,” the website wrote in its survey results.
If people aren’t attending theatre shows, it’s because 81 percent say cost is the biggest deterrent. But if they are attending, then the ability to choose their own seats was cited by 84 percent as the most important factor when buying a theatre ticket.
“In comparison, just over half of those survey cited booking and transactions fees as the most important factor when buying tickets,” Whatsonstage wrote.
The full results can be found here.
(Image: Drew Withington/Creative Commons)
According to a Bloomberg Business report in 2014, almost 1,750 spectators are hurt at baseball games every year by batted balls. After a string of high-profile foul ball and broken bat incidents this season, teams across all levels are faced with a dilemma. Do they extend safety netting down the baselines to protect fans (and if so, how far), or do they leave the netting as it has been for decades? Is there something in between that can be done to help protect the fans while not diminishing their experiences?
I’m in the camp that believes it’s time for baseball to mandate additional netting. As a baseball fan and a purist, this isn’t an easy decision. As far back as I can remember, I have very fond memories of sitting close to the action, asking for autographs and bringing my glove in anticipation of foul balls. But as a stadium manager, it’s an easier decision. As stadium managers, it’s our responsibility to keep fans safe. I think we can add netting in a manner that doesn’t adversely affect the fan experience while improving fan safety.
Net systems like Dyneema promise maximum protection with minimal visual obstruction and have been adopted by several Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums already. Adding this system down the baselines could provide protection while not obstructing fan’s views like traditional netting. Additionally, MLB could look at retractable netting like the ones their National Football League counterparts use for field goals that would allow the netting to be lowered before and after the game and between innings so fans can still have that close interaction.
Ironically, netting may also actually increase the fan experience. A lot of fans aren’t willing to sit close to the action out of fear, nor can they afford the expensive close seats behind home plate that provide netting protection (fans pay a lot of money to sit behind that netting so perhaps it isn’t too obstructive). Increased netting would allow more fans the opportunity to sit closer to the action and also allow them to enjoy the game without feeling stressed or afraid with every swing of the bat. For example, we recently had long-time season ticket holders ask to move their seats behind our home plate netting for the upcoming season, saying they feel like they’ll be more relaxed watching the games.
Another important component of the fan experience is the ability for guests to interact with the team during the game. Teams are telling fans to use their smartphones more than ever—text us, tweet us, Snapchat us, order your food from your phone, and share with the world that you’re at the game! But only do so when a 100 mph hour foul ball might possibly not be coming in your direction. Protective netting could actually allow for more of this in-game experience without fans having to keep their heads on swivels.
If we choose to add netting, the next question is how far the netting should extend, considering every ballpark has different sizes, shapes, and dimensions. According to Edwin Comber of the website www.foulballz.com, the most dangerous areas for foul balls are between the home plate netting and the end of the dugout. At Blair Field, we’ve come up with a few different ideas based on our stadium’s configuration, and most stadium managers know their ballparks’ nooks and crannies well enough to determine what provides optimal safety. MLB is also studying the variations in ballpark design that could affect netting and where balls enter the stands most often. These studies should help answer how far to extend the netting. However, if netting is at least required to extend to the end of the dugout, it would seemingly reduce many potential serious injuries.
Extra netting isn’t perfect and won’t stop every ball from entering the stands, but it will help. As stadium managers, it’s our goal to provide fans with a safe and enjoyable experience. I believe that protective netting can improve safety while not diminishing that enjoyable experience (and perhaps even enhancing it!). Baseball purists and fans who are against extra netting need not look back too far to find a time when processes changed and fans adjusted just fine. Walkthrough metal detectors were recently mandated for fans safety and many ballparks have found a way to make the entry process just as quick and efficient as before. Protective netting can turn out the same. Hopefully, after some likely initial pushback, most fans won’t even recognize the change, except for those fans that can have a safer and more enjoyable experience at the ballpark.
(Image: wBKRw/Creative Commons)