Marketing lessons from Geek Squad

Robert Stephens, CEO and founder at Geek Squad, delivered the second keynote at Customer Service is the New Marketing (yesterday’s blog post about the first keynote).

His comments echoed much of what Tony had to say about creating a great company culture. Although his talk touched on customer service and experience, it actually largely touched on brand — as in the marketing kind, not the kind a company gets over time based on it’s products and services. I was surprised how much time he spent at a conference about customer service talking about what ties the Agents wear and what cars they drive.

Marketing on the soles of his shoes
If I had to boil down what he said into three points, they would be:

Be yourself. In a time where Web 2.0 design has hijacked most website’s brand look and feel, companies like Geek Squad (and SmugMug acknowledged the value of looking different at the Crunchies) smartly swim against the tide. The retro police detective schtick works well. The brand is everywhere, including in the Agent’s shoes, tie, shirts, socks, and die-cast badge.

Put your brand at every step — literally. Because Geek Squad buys outfits for their Agents, it made sense at some point — the point at which it was cost effective — to make custom shoes. But not just any shoes. These shoes supposedly have a reverse imprint of the company logo on the soles of the shoes.

Robert did the math, too — people step an average of 7,000 times per day, he said. Multiply that by the number of Agents on the street, you possibly get some killer guerrilla marketing with each step.

There’s no way to measure the ROI, of course. What are the odds the shoes will make an imprint on any given day… and will anyone see it… and will it have any effect? But since they have to purchase so many shoes anyway, and since the cost was not that much more to create the imprint, it seemed like a good idea.

It’s time to grow up. He sold Geek Squad to Best Buy. In one fell swoop — hiring, training, and customer acquisition solved. Hiring — it exposes Geek Squad to gadget geeks shopping at Best Buy. Training — Geek Squad Agents also get a nice discount at Best Buy so they can try and test and learn the gadgets that they’re eventually going to have to support. Customer acquisition — customer opportunities walk through the door every day.

While you can’t put an exact value on this branding, it demonstrates Geek Squad’s ability to think different, to utilize every part of their vast workforce, and to do it all without incurring excessive costs or time.