مقدمه

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

—Western Union internal memo, 1876

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”

—an investor in response to David Sarnoff’s push for radio, 1920

“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.”

—Lee De Forest, radio pioneer, 1926

“Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.”

—Cliff Stoll, author, astronomer, professor, 1995

“If I had a nickel for every time an investor told me this wouldn’t work…”

—Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon

PREFACE

I’ve been living the Thank You Economy since a day sometime around 1995, when a customer came into my dad’s liquor store and said, “I just bought a bottle of Lindemans Chardonnay for $5.99, but I got your $4.99 coupon in the mail. Can you honor it? I’ve got the receipt.” The store manager working the floor at the time replied, “No.” I looked up from where I was on my knees dusting the shelves and saw the guy’s eyes widen as he said, “Are you serious?” The manager said, “No, no. You have to buy more to get it at $4.99.” As the man left, I went over to the manager and said, “That guy will never come back.” I was wrong about that; he did come back. He came back a couple of months later—to tell us he would never shop with us again.

Now, I wasn’t any nicer than this manager, nor have I ever been a softie when it comes to business. However, though I was young and still had a lot to learn, I knew deep in my gut that he had made the wrong call. The manager believed he was protecting the store from a customer trying to take advantage of it; all I could see was that we had missed an opportunity to make a customer happy.

Make no mistake: I’ve always seen business as a way to build a legacy, and a way to make people happy, but I’ve also been in the game to make money, not just to spread sunshine and rainbows. I’m the kid who ripped people’s flowers out of their yards and sold them back to their owners. My incentive to make that customer happy wasn’t purely altruistic; it was that happy customers are worth a lot more than any other kind. It was grounded in my belief at the time that a business is only as strong as its closest customer relationships, and that what those customers said about our business beyond our four walls would shape our future.

I didn’t write The Thank You Economy to encourage businesses and brands to be nicer to their customers. I wrote it because what I believed was true back then is turning out to be even truer today. I’m intuitive that way. It’s why I knew I should sell all my baseball cards and go into toy collectibles; why I launched WineLibrary.com in 1997 when nobody thought local liquor stores belonged online; why I decided to go all in on Australian and Spanish wines in 1999 when everyone else was still obsessed with France, California, and Italy. It’s how I knew to use Twitter from the get-go, and that video blogging was going to be a big deal. And it’s why I know I’m right now.

I want people who love running businesses and building businesses as much as I do—whether they’re entrepreneurs, run a small business, or work for a Fortune 100 company—to understand what early adopters like me can already see—that we have entered a new era in which developing strong consumer relationships is pivotal to a brand or company’s success. We have been pushing our message for too many decades. It’s no longer enough that a strong marketing initiative simply funnels a brand’s one-way message down the consumer’s throat. To have an impact, it will have to inspire an emotionally charged interaction.

Just as open, honest communication is the key to good interpersonal relationships, so is it intrinsic to a brand or business’s relationships with its customers. People embraced social media because communicating makes people happy; it’s what we do. It’s why we carved pictures into rocks. It’s why we used smoke signals. It’s why ink won. And if someone ever develops a tool that allows us to communicate telepathically, we’ll be all over that, too. How businesses will adapt to that kind of innovation, I have no idea. But they will, I’m sure. At least, the ones I am associated with will.

In the meantime, companies of all stripes and sizes have to start working harder to connect with their customers and make them happy, not because change is coming, but because it’s here. Imagine how many more people would have heard that we’d lost an unhappy customer’s business if the man who couldn’t get his coupon redeemed at Wine Library all those years ago had had a cell phone loaded with a Twitter and Facebook app. What’s more, the changes we’ve already seen are just the first little bubbles breaking on the water’s surface. The consumer Web is just a baby—many people reading this right now can probably clearly remember the world pre-Internet. The cultural changes social media have ushered in are already having a big impact on marketing strategies, but eventually, companies that want to compete are going to have to change their approach to everything, from their hiring practices to their customer service to their budgets. Not all at once, mind you. But it will have to happen, because there is no slowing down the torpedo-like speed with which technology is propelling us into the Thank You Economy. I, for one, think that’s a good thing. By the time you’re done with this book, I hope you’ll agree.