John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, has an excellent blog post up on the Whole Foods web site titled Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats, and The Federal Trade Commission.
Whole Foods is trying to acquire Wild Oats and the FTC is challenging the merger. As I scanned through my online newspapers this morning as part of my morning routine, I saw articles in each of them (Boulder Camera, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, NY Times, and WSJ) about this. The deal is getting a lot of airplay locally since Wild Oats is a Boulder-based company and Whole Foods has significant presence here.
Most of the articles positioned the story using a few quotes from an email from Mackey. My first reaction was “eh – that sounds pretty normal from a CEO of the market leader – what’s the big deal?” One of the articles pointed to the blog that Mackey wrote. It’s brilliant – one of the best examples I’ve seen of a CEO using a corporate blog to get his point of view clearly out in the open. The executive summary follows:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed a complaint challenging the merger of Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats. Whole Foods Market intends to fight this complaint in court. My blog posting provides a detailed look into Whole Foods Market’s decision-making process regarding the merger, as well as our company’s experience interacting with the FTC staff assigned to this merger. I provide explanations of how I think the FTC, to date, has neglected to do its homework appropriately, especially given the statements made regarding prices, quality, and service levels in its complaint. I also provide a glimpse into the bullying tactics used against Whole Foods Market by this taxpayer-funded agency. Finally, I provide answers in my FAQ section to many of the questions that various Team Members have fielded from both the media and company stakeholders.
As stated in our initial press release about Whole Foods Market’s challenge to the FTC’s complaint, we set an intention as a company to be as transparent as possible throughout this process. This is my first detailed effort at transparency. We will provide additional information as we field new questions and receive updates on the proceedings from the FTC and the courts.
The goal of transparency is presumably one that the FTC – if they approach this from an enlightened point of view – can respect. Many corporate blogs are just regurgitated PR – the authenticity of this one from Mackey is really impressive. Who knows how this really plays out – it’ll be instructive to watch.
I am regularly amazed at the amount of money consumer electronics, mobile device, and cell phone companies spend on “stupid customer service tricks.” I got the following note from a friend that has a Sony Reader.
My screen cracked for some reason. Probably got hit in my bag somehow. I sent it in to Sony for service and they offered to fix it for $272; a new unit is $299. I declined. I sent a letter to the Sony USA VP marketing. I pointed out that when my ipod broke, I got a new one in 20 minutes at the store, no questions asked. And the contrast in experiences is why my family of 4 has 8 ipods but is only likely to have 1 reader. I got a nice phone call last night and a new reader is on its way!
I am a consumer electronics junkie – you name it, I probably have (or have had) it. My best two customer experiences to date have been the Sonos (truly amazing) and Slingbox (we are investors so I’m glad it’s amazing.) Apple has also been a happy place to be, as long as I walk into the store and give them my sad puppy dog look. Most everything else sucks. When something breaks (like my Sony DVD player did last month), I just buy another one to replace it rather than struggle through the six week “send it in and then pay us almost as much as another one to get it fixed” routine.)
The Sony Reader example above is completely consistent with my reality. It’d be so easy for Sony to start by sending out another one and have a delighted customer. The result would be worth much more than the cost of incremental customer acquisition and the customer destruction support function. The strategy of “send me your broken thing and I’ll replace it” seems so logical today in a world where people shout from the rooftops about the great experiences – buying much more goodwill than a million banner ads.
At least the Sony USA VP Marketing has a clue. Maybe Sony should put her in charge of customer care!
I occasionally use this blog as a job board so if you aren’t looking for a job, please ignore this. Also – if you aren’t a superb Flash ActionScript developer that is willing to take on a short term (but super cool) consulting gig, please also ignore this post.
If you are an star Flash ActionScript developer that can add custom GUI elements, modify some animation routines, and extend the XML used in API calls, please drop me an email along with a resume and/or URL links to work that you’ve done.
What Fred said. Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and Ning) has been blogging up a storm and it’s awesome. His post from yesterday titled The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 1: Why not to do a startup is just awesome.
My other favorite posts include:
Wow. Marc – keep them coming!
I had the following exchange with the CEO of one of my investments the other day.
Q (Brad): It’s strange to me that only a few of the investors / board members are using Product X. Any insights?
A (CEO): I’m in two minds. One is that my investors should use Product X to be more informed. On the other hand, I’m usually very careful to get investors to use a product I’m building just because I asked them to. There are only a few investors who are potential target users in the early days. I have done it in the past, and I often get feedback that I have to deal with because I made them play with the product. My goal is to get the product to a point where they end up using it because it’s that good, and that we’re targeting their target demographic.
I thought this was a great answer. I’ve written about this before at Product Focused Venture Capital and Do Your Investors Use Your Product? I’ve always been attracted to companies that make things I can use and immerse myself in. However, I realize that this isn’t necessarily representative of the VC community and I loved the CEO’s notion that his goal was to build a product that became so compelling that his investors naturally would use it.
Amy and I became addicted to Lost this year after my brother and his wife gave us Season 1 on DVD for some holiday gift thing. If you are lost in Lost, check out the following video of the plane crash sequence.
Someone went to the trouble of splicing the segments together across a bunch of different episodes – it’s pretty dramatic.
My buddy Ben Casnocha had his book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley reviewed in the NY Times today by Harry Hurt III. Ben told me about this last week and is justifiably excited.
One of my favorite lines from Ben is “I don’t want to be normal. I want to be something else.” Hurt picks it as the theme of his review and does a great job capturing the essence of the book.
I’ve never wanted to be normal either and I love having friends who aren’t.
Unless you’ve been on vacation and off the grid for the last two months, you’ve probably noticed the explosive growth with Facebook with a new and exciting demographic – all the web / tech nerds that previously weren’t using Facebook. I went to my Facebook account this morning to try to figure out when I originally created an account and can’t remember, but there’s been a rapid growth in my friends since the Facebook F8 platform launch.
I’ve gone from checking my Facebook account once a week to once a day. I still haven’t clicked on any of the ads, but I’ll assume that a lot of the advertising is CPM-based instead of CPC-based which means they are making more money off of me at this point.
In addition to my account (feel free to friend me if you are a Feld Thoughts reader), please join the Feld Thoughts group. If you read AsktheVC, please join the AsktheVC group. And – if you are interested in the Implicit Web and/or the upcoming Defrag conference, join the Implicit Web group.
As a special bonus feature, I’ve been twittering for a while as part of my socialogical experiment to see how much boring content I can generate for The Internets. I’m now looking for a crack programmer to write a quick script that generates random twitters off of a pre-canned database of commentary that I create.
Yes – it’s all fascinating, at least to me.
We had a lot of fun on Thursday at the TechStars Funding Your Startup event. A few people have written great blog summaries about it, including one from eNeighbors, Certifyre, and stopthejunkmail.com. Given the audience (> 200 people) and the response, I think David Cohen is going to do one more public TechStars event this summer.