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Tag: customer centric

  • Is The Right-Brain The “Right” Brain to Appeal to When Boosting Marketing Effectiveness?

    Is The Right-Brain The “Right” Brain to Appeal to When Boosting Marketing Effectiveness?

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    For decades, psychologists, therapists and behaviorists labored under the mistaken impression that the brain was separated into two hemispheres, and each had a different set of executive functions. The continuation of the myth in marketing terms has lead to a field of study and application called “Right-Brain Research”.  More modern and sophisticated studies have debunked the myth, and it’s been accepted that both hemispheres control a variety of functions and that cross-over between the two is significant and intricate. So where does that leave marketers?

    Right where they started, trying to find the emotional triggers that with prompt an action, a response to advertising, images, video, messaging and other inputs, that drive purchasing behavior. But all is not lost . . .

    Good primary customer insight research, when well-designed and executed, can generate reams of relevant and useful data that can be studied, parsed and dissected to derive insights into the customers of your particular brand, product or service.

    Listeners will discover:

    • How to get inside the head of their customer and use the information to spur action
    • How to set up and analyze the resulting conversational qual data
    • How to use the results to make decisions on media, message, and imagery

    Learn the secrets hidden in your customer’s heads, and how to use them to attract more buyers and boost your brand, in less than 30 minutes!

  • Five Ways Customer Research Can Build Your Business

    Five Ways Customer Research Can Build Your Business

    Most businesses we encounter in our practice appear from the outside to be “doing fine”, and its only after a few pointed key questions of the senior management do the challenges and problems surface. Most business owners feel that they “know their customers” and understand them sufficiently to serve them and sell to them.  Yet, when we initiate some customer insight research, we inevitably find that there are many facets to their customer base, some of whom are being served well (the Core), some of whom are being served peripherally (the Fringe), and some of whom are being completely ignored, if not disenfranchised (the Outliers). If our research is structured correctly, we can uncover areas of growth potential in all three groups, providing tremendous opportunities for most businesses to significantly move the needle on sales and revenue. These are five ways our results can be directed toward growth:

     

    • Tighten the focus on the Core. While these folks are generally repeat customers, long-terms clients and loyal to a fault, they can always increase their numbers, frequency and volume, often by tightening and focusing messaging, narrowing media choices to those that are most effective, and “clipping the menu” of benefits, product offerings and services to those that they frequently enjoy.
    • Uncover Opportunity Within The Fringe. Infrequent customers, on and off clients, low-volume buyers, those with a high browse-to-buy ratio, are where the greatest opportunities often lie. There is the largest potential for growth among this group, to bring them up to the level of the Core group and beyond, by tailoring the product, packaging, messaging, media selection, and benefit focus to their needs. Now you have to uncover those real needs and cater to them to beef up the volume and frequency of their behavior.
    • Learn About Off-Label Uses From the Fringe. Occasionally, our research will uncover a related, but not fully realized, use for a product or service, one that the product wasn’t designed for, but that customers saw as a functional substitute for something else. Sometimes this warrants a small product or packaging change to accommodate and expand upon before offering it to customers. Sometimes this reveals co-packaging, or co-marketing opportunities previously not realized, which lead to whole new revenue streams. These can also present opportunities to bring the Outliers in closer and boost their volume using the new product usage as a lever.
    • Call In The Outliers. Discovering the resistance points and friction points in doing business with you or buying your products often presents itself most readily when speaking with the Outliers. These folks bought from you or worked with you for one or a couple of several real reasons: you were the only game in town at the time; you were the least expensive; you were the most convenient to their current circumstances; they were pressed for time and didn’t want to make a conscious choice. These are targets of opportunity, but they will show up where your customer interface is weak, where there are barriers to convenience, obstacles to purchase, price sensitivity, weaknesses in package focus, product size, and a host of small deficiencies that these casual buyers won’t surmount to buy from you. Something as simple as a slightly smaller size for sale at convenience outlets, or a reduced service package for smaller customers, can boost sales noticeably at minimal cost, and keep margins intact.
    • Find A New Sector. Within each of the other sector targets there will be clues as to a new customer sector that’s out there being ignored or forgotten, and they will reveal themselves through the conversations with both Outliers and Fringe customers. They answer questions about current behaviors beginning with “Well, I used to do ____, but now . . .” They refer to a previous reason to buy that may or may not currently exist with the current product or service, or that existed with another brand they bought before switching, and that’s where the opportunity lies. Ferret out those differences, those “old” reasons and see if they still exist, you might have turned off a whole sector of customers and didn’t know it by making a change earlier that you can now revisit and capture them back.

     

    The name of the game is knowing your customer base better, segmenting your offering appropriately, and hunting for clues of things that turn them on and off and using that knowledge to your advantage in the marketplace to approach each group as efficiently and effectively as possible.

     

    If you think your business can benefit from knowing your customers better for any of the above reasons, or something entirely different, you owe it to yourself to investigate further. The costs are far outweighed by the benefits in both the short- and long-term.

     

  • How To Think Like Designers

    How To Think Like Designers

    This is What We Do – Thought this was interesting . . .

     IBM hires hundreds of these workers to shake up clients — including Vodafone — and figure out what customers want

    JUSTIN TALLIS/GETTY-AFP

    What do your customers want? That’s not a skill that comes naturally to the engineers who build software for big corporations. But in a world filled with user-friendly smartphone apps, clunky enterprise software is no longer tenable.

    So to shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs-at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.

    At IBM, they team up with engineers and consultants and embed with a multiplicity of clients. Besides providing customer i nsights, t he t eams encourage constant feedback and tweak products as they’re built — a process aimed at getting them out faster. It’s how successful Silicon Valley startups operate but radical for the IT services industry.

    IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty has bet the future of the services division on design thinking. She badly needs the strategy to work if her company is to reverse 17 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and adapt to a cloud-based world. In the past few years, the company has recruited about 1,250 designers, built a global network of design studios and is training employees to incorporate design thinking into almost everything they do.

    By the end of this year, the company says, about a third of the 377,000-strong workforce will have been retrained. The goal is to build a customer-centric, startup-esque culture — and then persuade clients to do the same.

    Brian Corish never planned on joining a big corporation like Vodafone; the serial entrepreneur was used to working at startups where knowing what the customer wanted was baked into the DNA. But when the head of Vodafone’s Irish operations came calling for help enhancing the company’s online pres- ence, Corish saw an opportunity to teach the startup ethos to a company with lots of unused information about its customers.

    His new bosses didn’t say precisely what they meant by the digital transformation, but Corish soon concluded he needed to reorganize the entire culture around its customers.

    As a big, established company, he says, Vodafone hadn’t bothered providing the best consumer experience because it already had a massive customer base and was making money building and selling products the way it always had.

    Corish decided to bring in outside help but was underwhelmed when all the consulting firms talked up previous projects rather than focusing on the challenge at hand. IBM sent its team back for a second try. This time they ran design thinking exercises with 30 or so attendees.

    A lot of the discussions centered on actual customers, what they didn’t want and what they wanted more of. Darren Gerry, an IBM designer, says Vodafone attendees were shocked at the revelations, having never thought about customer needs and desires in those ways.

    To start, IBM was asked to build a self-service portal that would let employees working for Vodafone’s enterprise clients order phones and other workrelated gadgets themselves.

    Gerry says his team developed a close relationship with the client, keeping the project transparent and demonstrating to Vodafone how design thinking works. Corish, keen to teach as many people as possible about design thinking, helped facilitate the indoctrination, starting at the top; that’s when senior management met the Snapchatobsessed teenager.

    Traditional enterprise software projects can drag on for years before bearing fruit. IBM delivered the first version of Vodafone’s self-service portal in six weeks. Corish says his colleagues were astounded how quickly the job got done. “The rest of the organization went, ‘ Oh, you really can do this,’ ” he says. “It doesn’t have to take five years.”

    Before the self-service portal was built, enterprise clients had to call Vodafone to order a new device, often spending days getting it configured. Now they can use their own logins to order a phone or tablet, which arrives in a couple of days and works right out of the box. “If we don’t focus on the customer,” Corish says, “we’ll be irrelevant.” Much the same could be said about IBM.

  • Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    Center On Customer Experience To Sell Out Events

    We’ve long advised companies who want to be market leaders to adopt a customer-centric stance in their internal and marketing attitude. That advice has been well received, but often reluctantly implemented, due to the complexity and length of time involved in properly instituting a sea change in their organizations. While we admit, thoughtful and well-considered moves of this magnitude do not happen overnight, they can be implemented incrementally, and start showing results sooner than a cold start.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you – they’ve received their product, paid the invoice, shaken hands after the exit interview, whatever trigger ends an interaction cycle with your firm. Now, ponder for a second what happened, how was that customer feeling at that last few minutes of interaction? Were they thrilled to receive their product and can’t wait to use it, were they a little disappointed because it took longer than expected to arrive, or didn’t live up to the expectations you set for them, did they care at all, or did they just put it aside until a more convenient time?

    If you’re a service provider, what feeling or sentiment preceded that last handshake or interaction (not counting the invoice, we’ll get to that in a moment)? Was it buoyant that they got what they needed from you, were they excited about the next time they worked with you, relieved they had gotten a good outcome without getting scalped, happy to be out of your clutches? Behind that smile and that handshake is a wide range of emotions and feelings that those clients or customers will carry with them for quite a while, and the next contact they have with you, including any further marketing or follow-up efforts, will trigger a somewhat milder version of that emotion, guiding their next response to you.

    The place to start is by working backwards. Think about your customer or client, at the moment they are just finished interacting with you

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change. Now that you have some idea of where to start in examining your customer experience, backtrack through your engagement with that customer in your mind, go through the steps that lead up to that final feeling. Work it over logistically, reverse-chronologically, and see if there are any snags, bumps in the road, places where communication status dipped, where the customer might have felt anything negative, like abandonment, uncertainty, fear of the unknown, or experienced something negatively unexpected. Those are your trouble spots, and in the journey of customer experience, those are the places where you can negatively affect your customer relationship and their likelihood to return to you the next time they need something you offer.

    First impressions are critical, but last impressions are often lasting and difficult to change.

    Even marketing can REALLY benefit from this process. Work through the attendee experience minute by minute. Review your program from the time the attendee hears about the event, what triggers them to register, what do they experience once they’ve registered, how often do they hear from you, what kinds of information do they receive from you, or what do they go searching for in your materials or online? How do they go about booking travel if any is required, do they look for a deal or the flight and hotel that most readily meets their limited schedule, or a combination of both? Do they stay in the host hotel to be “close to the action” or somewhere off-site to maintain privacy and corporate security?

    What do they encounter upon arrival? How did they get there? What do they see first? Are they run down endless hallways before they encounter anyone officially connected with the event, or are they greeted by someone clearly in-the-know that they can ask questions of right away? Is there a place to “unburden” themselves, divesting their arms of coats, bags, luggage, umbrellas, etc, before they get a badge? Is everything conveniently located, and labeled in large, unambiguous letters with pictograms for international attendees?

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom . . .

    Work through the whole meeting, trying to empathize with the attendee from the time they see your first e-mail announcement until the time they get back to their place of origin, and include your post event survey if that goes out beyond the 24-hour post event mark. Now you have a basis for evaluating your customer experience from an attendee-centric point of view. Using that as a baseline, try and separate the logistical, intellectual experience from the emotional one. Tease out those feelings as the flow from one to another and try to envision an overall emotional response to the event, and connect the emotional changes to each major logistical challenge they face. You now have a roadmap to isolating the negative emotional contexts in your meeting and either mitigating them or eliminating them, to provide your attendee a positive customer experience end to end.

    Now that you’ve done the ground work, how do you use that knowledge in your marketing efforts to attract more attendees the next time? Pull out the outreach materials you used to promote and raise awareness of that meeting, the elements that drove attendance. Do they highlight all the customer experiences and benefits you experienced mentally? Do they convey the emotional punch, the triggers to emotions you felt when you entered the meeting? Do they walk the attendee through what they will experience, show the benefits of those experiences, make it easy, painless and simple for them to experience them? Do they set accurate expectations for the attendee that you can always live up to in real life? If the answer to any of these is “no,” then those are the areas that need some work in your programming, planning and marketing efforts, to align the real experience with the “paper” version your espousing in your marketing efforts.

    Admittedly, some of these areas may be beyond your control – you can’t guarantee a positive experience from the airlines, or that the hotel concierge will treat them politely, or that their favorite shampoo will be in the hotel bathroom – but once they enter your meeting venue, they are your responsibility, and taking that seriously can mean the difference between a one-time attendee and a lifetime cheerleader for your events. Pay special attention to the way they feel when they leave. Did they learn something valuable, did they meet someone important to their professional growth, did they learn something about a new subject or a different culture? What feeling are you leaving them with, what will they remember when they complete that online “satisfaction” survey? Hopefully the emotion won’t just be satisfaction, but something stronger and more positive – the one you planned to leave.

  • Deep Branding Is The Real Thing . . . How To Achieve It And Keep It Thriving

    Deep Branding Is The Real Thing . . . How To Achieve It And Keep It Thriving

    There are an awful lot of misconceptions about what branding is, how branding works, what purpose it serves, how much time, money, and energy should be devoted toward brand and branding activities. We see it in our practice, usually from business owners whose job it is not to ponder such things at any depth, but to have enough grasp to understand when someone more informed uses the term in a meeting.

    This isn’t new.

    Ad agencies and their clients have been hosting a debate about branding activity for decades, usually to persuade their clients to increase their spend on TV and radio branding ads for their products, if for no other reason than the products brand was a multi-faceted one, which required a lot more work to encapsulate in a :30 spot, and it was easier to do several ads with different focus or messaging and run them all in series to get the job done.

    Most purveyors of products or services have a sense of what brand is, from a rather shallow perspective – in their minds it involves logos, online buzz, color palette, some minor but repetitive messaging points, and that’s where their story ends. I contend, along with some other professionals, that the surface stuff that gets readily recognized as branding is just the tip of the iceberg.

    Branding in our experience involves a showcase of authenticity, consistency, values, reliability of delivery, and transparency of presentation that transcends all the hype, the spin, the gloss, and is a set of characteristics at the root of why the company and its products work and perform as they do. The more the members of a given company live, breathe, work and display the characteristics of the firm as a whole, the more effective those branding efforts become. That level of authenticity can be achieved, but it requires a company-wide commitment to those same values, and a mind-set that allows each and every employee to deliver on that promise, no matter what it is, each and every day for each and every interaction with customers, vendors and others. That’s a pretty tall order for most companies, but look how successful those who achieve it can become.

    Some great examples in a number of sectors include: L.L. Bean (who doesn’t know that their stuff is rugged and practical, but also can be returned over it’s life, no questions asked, no fuss, free), BMW (widely through of as at the peak of commercial automotive performance engineering for the masses) Harley-Davidson (tough, patriotic, ruggedly individual customers who have a passion for things mechanical and cool), Campbells (feel-good, inexpensive, but consistently healthy and sensible simple meals in a can), Clorox (when you want something white, clean, back to it’s basic elements, synonymous with bleach) and so on. It’s all about delivering something people desire consistently over years and holding that trust with the customer to deliver in a way that’s familiar.

    For those in the know, branding isn’t a fad or a new buzzword – it’s a way of being. It’s not just the packaging, it’s what and how that package is delivered, time after time, to those who know and love it. To those with a slighter understanding of the idea, the buzz talk may be overwhelming, even tiresome, because their definition is so limited and they don’t see what all the fuss is about.

    There are quite a few business tomes penned by quite informed and well-educated authors on the subject, but I won’t make any recommendations here as I would certainly run afoul of those I omitted. Suffice it to say that if you select a few of these to read in your spare time, you’ll come away with the clear idea that few have a clear idea of what it is, and how to maximize it’s value – the top practitioners of the art are the ones that really get it, and they’re too busy working to maintain and burnish their company’s brands to write books. Branding is still as much art as science, and those with an intuitive understanding of the art, with a gut sense of what their company’s brand represents will be the victor in the war for consumer mindshare.

  • Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    Let Customer’s Imagination Flow for Effective Research

    If you want to boost sales, increase membership, enhance volunteer participation, increase market share or find new profit niches, the best methods start with knowing your target audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is to listen to them. How you listen, and how you organize and collate the results of that listening is the determining factor in the usefulness of the data, and the accuracy and actionability of your analysis. Clearly, much depends on the goal, but the type of research you select will drive the type of information you receive, and dictate how reliable it is.

    For sales-, membership-, and interest-based organizations, a method termed “Right-Brain” research could hold the key to cost effective, actionable information you can use quickly and effectively to increase your knowledge of prospective customers.

    The human brain consists of two “hemispheres” left and right. Based on Nobel award-winning research by Roger Sperry in the late 1960s, it was determined that each has different functions and characteristics associated with it. Sperry’s research showed that the Left side of the brain is responsible for the more linear functions and thoughts – math, computation, organization, languages (not speech directly), rational analysis, value prioritization and decision-making. The Right side is responsible for the more interpretive and sensory aspects, like art, music, philosophy, creativity, visualization, and imagination. Left is rational, Right is more intuitive and emotional, while neither is exclusively that way. In fact, the aspect of “handedness” is reversed; with the right side controlling motor and other functions on the left side of our bodies and vice versa. Recent studies have proven this to less than completely accurate, but it seems to work in practical applications.

    Often in decision-making, especially regarding purchasing behavior, the Left side is informed by the Right. The Left rationalizes the emotional inputs from the Right to drive a purchasing decision. To drive sales, it is fundamental to appeal to that tricky Right side. When divining the needs of the customer or prospect pool you’d like to reach, it is important to gather and record output directly from the Right side. One way to accomplish that is through verbal communication. A long-form, personal, one-on-one discussion with customers, but on a large, organized scale, will elicit results you can put to use in crafting a strategy to approach the entire pool of prospects. In short, the resulting data from such small group research is projectable.

    Right-brain research has been used to test new products in the prototype stage, test new concepts for advertising, movies, even gauge the effectiveness of customer service or test brand attributes for entire companies. It can be very effective, but it requires a high level of organization, some time and patience in listening and interpreting the results, and some resources to create the components and arrange for the interviews.

    The components of this method are fairly straightforward:

    • A set of goals for the research should be established and communicated to all involved – what do you hope to find out or accomplish when you are done?
    • Describe the target audience for this goal. Discover what attributes they have in common, what characteristics can be used to select them from the general population, and how they differ from the rest of the audience.
    • A profile of the ideal participant is developed. That profile is used to select a representative sample of respondents to participate in the interviews. This profile can include age, gender, marital status, purchasing behavior, geographic proximity, socio-economic status, professional standing or experience, education, membership in organizations and many other properties.
    • A Discussion Guide or Study Guide is created. This is the blueprint for the interviews, the guide for the interviewer to weave into their questions and discussions with the participants. It starts with the goals from the first step, to be sure that the questions drive responses that allow the researcher to answer the goals. It sounds simple, but if the goals are not realistic or the scope of the study is too broad, it will show up at this stage. This study guide is the key to effective implementation of this type of research. The questions have to be formulated in such a way as to elicit a response that is accurate, honest, direct, and emotionally unguarded. Often questions are asked multiple times in different ways to check for consistency of the answers.
    • Create the list of possible participants. In some cases, especially for consumer research of this type, the facility can offer some assistance in this area, as they often have pools of potential respondents and a good database of names and demographic data from which to select a pool of candidates. Selections are made based on how closely they fit the selected set of attributes from the profile.
    • Candidates are recruited by phone, either by your staff or by the facility, and the offer is made. Most participants are compensated for their time, either with cash or an incentive gift of some sort that will appeal to the intended audience. Professionals like doctors and attorneys are usually compensated at a higher level as their time already has a given “value” in monetary terms, an hourly rate.
    • Respondents are scheduled for their interviews, which are usually 60-90 minutes in length. More than 10 interview sets per day per interviewer are not recommended as fatigue for the interviewers tends to taint the results. More than one interview can be conducted at one time, depending upon the availability of interviewers and the size of the facility. Over book initially on each day to account for no-shows when you confirm the schedule the day before the interviews by phone.
    • The interviews are conducted by skilled interviewers, professionals who are personable, knowledgeable, aware of the goals to be achieved, perceptive and skilled in interpreting human emotions and the associated verbal and physical cues that telegraph them. They are terrific listeners, and skillful at guiding the conversation to keep it on track and on time. The facilities can often recommend or have interviewers on staff.
    • Each interview is recorded to capture both audio and video, and tapes are labeled and packaged with the release form for each subject for later reference.

    Once the interviews are conducted, the tapes are reviewed, and transcripts are made, to remove any “image bias” generated by the subject’s appearance. Those tapes and those transcripts are used to analyze and codify the results, to distill them into some sort of organized format that can be used to make recommendations for action.

    How do you make the jump from transcripts to action?

    Analyzing the results of such research is a skill unto itself, as the interviews generate a huge amount of data, buried deep in the responses. It takes time and patience,(and a very left-brain-oriented person) to organize, sift, and distill all those conversations, picking out commonalities and similarities among them, and highlighting stark differences and inconsistencies that can signal false results, or emotionally guarded responses. Once that glut of data is distilled and interpreted, those interpretations are put together in an organized fashion, ranked, rated and codified, much as you would survey data or focus group data. Those ratings and rankings are put into a report, along with recommendations for action.

    Uses for the final analysis vary widely. Some distill the video recordings, editing them down to some representative responses for each major question, some pro and some con, and present them in video form along with the written analysis. Sometimes, just the transcript is enough to get a sense of the trend of the responses, and can show glaring problems or highlight positive areas simply and quickly. Sometimes the two are combined in a multi-media presentation for added impact.

    This type of research can highlight any number of aspects of the prospect pool, depending on how the research guide is structured. The more aspects of the prospective audience that are included in the study, the less depth you get in any one area. For a accurate study that is statistically projectable, and has a high degree of confidence, 30-40 interviews will usually suffice. Depending on how small the area of interest or niche you want to study, the toughest part might be finding enough respondents to interview.

    How does The Right Brain Approach complement other research methods?

    The Right Brain Approach measures emotions, not people.  Quantitative data is valuable, but the information it provides can be even more valuable when used in conjunction with Right Brain Research.  For example, if you conduct Right Brain Research before a quantitative survey, you will know what the key issues are and will be able to ask the right questions and ask them in the right way based on the actual language that consumers use.  Once Right Brain Research results are known, future surveys can target the factors that affect buying decisions with more accuracy.

    How can we use what we learn from Right Brain Research in conjunction with the results of our quantitative research?

    What you gain in understanding from Right Brain Research will illuminate the information garnered in quantitative assessments.  Now you have a chance to know the rest of the story!  Actually, the Paul Harvey analogy is an excellent one.  He tells you all the facts with no interpretive framework.  Your mind goes off in all different directions trying to make sense of what he is saying.  Then he hits you with a surprising ending or twist and all the facts make sense in a startling way.  This is what Right Brain Research can do for your company/brand/packaging.*

    No matter how you approach it, speaking directly with a population closely representative of your target audience is extremely empowering in it ability to accurately inform your creative, sales, membership recruitment or product development activities. You can’t know too much about customers, and this method allows you to gain insights that can’t be accessed any other way quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.

  • Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    Adam Richardson provides exquisite validation to Granite Partners’ research based marketing approach, in this well thought out blog post from Harvard Business Review. I couldn’t have said it better, so I bring it to you in it’s original form. Enjoy!

    Don’t Assume You Know Your Customers

    by Adam Richardson  |

    If the recent U.S. election taught us anything, it’s that you have to be careful assuming that others see the world the way you do. It’s very easy for any organization — political, commercial, not-for-profit — to get caught up in its own echo chamber of like-minded believers. After certain blogs, social media outlets, pundits, and talk shows whipped themselves into a self-reinforcing frenzy, many people were stunned by the election outcome. How could so many “experts” have gotten it so wrong?

    Shared enthusiasm and beliefs are valuable assets when pushing for a goal. In a business context, it’s vital that your employees are emotionally invested in your company’s vision. But there need to be checks and balances to make sure that the vision matches external reality, or you could be enthusiastically charging toward a similar shock. As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick once remarked, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

    Getting an objective view of who you, as an organization, are trying to serve is critical, but it’s easier said than done.

    Most companies are the centers of their own universes. It’s a natural enough impression; after all, the products and services they offer are on their minds 24/7. The trap is in those companies deluding themselves into thinking that they are as important to their customers as they are to themselves. This is almost never the case. This delusion interferes with understanding customers and their needs, and frequently leads companies to talk to customers in ways that seem foreign or confusing.

    Financial services, the area that I work in now, is an example. It is rampant with confusing jargon and terminology, such as compound interest, ETFs, or the now infamous CDO, or collateralized debt obligation. A 2008 AARP study found that 79% of Americans think prescription drug instructions are easier to understand than materials from financial firms.

    But the financial services industry is not alone. Health care, wireless communications, real estate, information technology, and airlines are all major industries that consistently confuse and turn off their customers, leading to mistrust and disloyalty.

    Jargon in communication is just the surface of the problem. People who work in these industries day-to-day become infused with insider knowledge, techniques, and perspectives. After a while they forget their former lack of expertise and start to assume that everyone must also possess their knowledge — customers included.

    Employees are like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome — they take on the worldview of their employer and industry, and forget what it’s like to be a “regular” person without this specialized knowledge. Over time, employees start to talk mostly about tangible product features and become distanced from customer needs and benefits. Value propositions become more abstract and lose the naïve freshness of seeing of who customers really are and how they think, behave, and feel. It becomes increasingly difficult to see your company and industry as nonexpert outsiders do.

    How do we fix this? There are many research methods for better understanding customers, and you may be using them already: ethnographic research, focus groups, surveys, in-store intercepts, and so on. It’s also important to encourage employees to use competitors’ products, so they don’t develop tunnel vision. These are good and necessary, but you can have lots of data and still not see what it’s saying.

    There are two things that can stand in the way getting real insight:

    1. Admitting you may be wrong. If the organization isn’t willing to recognize that it’s not connecting with customers, dismisses indications that customers are confused or uninterested as “irrelevant outliers,” or avoids the message by shooting the messenger, then all the research in the world won’t help. Yes, there are times when an organization needs to be visionary and do things that at first most customers don’t get. Salesforce.com’s pioneering role in the nascent area of cloud computing services is an example of a company that was willing to lose some customers early on in pursuit of the bigger market later. But you have to be very confident in the size of the potential opportunity — and have the organizational fortitude — to pull of that big of a bet. Silicon Valley is littered with companies that made similar bets and failed because ultimately their proposed view of reality never came to align with that of their target customers’.

    2. Garbage in, garbage out. If you’re talking to too narrow of a sample (as was the case with many of the conservative pollsters) or framing research questions in ways that subtly pre-bias the answers, you could be inadvertently creating ever-better products for a shrinking audience. Don’t just meet with your best and current customers; get outside the echo chamber by meeting with ex-customers or people who have never been your customers but love your competitors and the upstart disruptors. (Yes, this often stresses out the sales team.) Years ago, when I was at Sun Microsystems, many at the company initially dismissed the cheap servers then being introduced by Dell and Compaq. Our loyal customers at large companies with massive IT budgets weren’t interested in these low quality machines. Not then, anyway. Sun couldn’t bring itself to lower its standards, and as a result, it ceded a huge part of the market to competitors moving up from the PC space.

    Don’t wait for a catastrophe to show you when you’ve become too caught up in your own hype. Make sure you are continuously seeking a more thorough and objective understanding of your customers, harness the fresh perspectives of new employees, and have the humility to recognize that your customers may have needs and lives beyond your company.

    For more on research and customerinsights, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

  • Keep Your Audience Close . . .

    Keep Your Audience Close . . .

    As a marketer, I have a certain level of curiosity about my client’s customers, and how to reach them effectively, how to reach their emotions, to shift their perceptions, to alter their behavior in a way that helps them make the decision to buy, to join, to attend, to engage in some way. That curiosity is at the heart of all of our engagements, and as a research-based marketing strategy purveyor, we get to indulge that curiosity on behalf of clients every day, and after some discussion realized that we were all grateful for that.

    Knowing your audience thoroughly and as completely as you can is what makes for marketing success. It allows you to speak directly to them in your copy, it allows you to offer them products and services and opportunities that you KNOW they will appreciate and will feel entitled to obtain. Knowing what they like, when they are likely to like or need what you offer, knowing what stage of life they are currently inhabiting, and being able to predict how they will react to a given opportunity allows you to present thing you have to offer in a way that other retailers and marketers can’t touch. Good research will allow you to do that, no matter what you’re selling.

    Many of our engagements involve outreach in the form of direct mail, which allows clients to reach a wide audience with customized offers or pricing or product choices created specifically for that individual or group of individuals, with remarkable success. Mail may seem antiquated in an era of high-speed social media, e-mail marketing, wireless mobile this and that, but really marketing is not about tools, its about connecting with the potential buyer in a way that influences them. It’s about influencing them to consider your products and services for purchase. Purchases make companies money, period. So really, all the online communities, all the digital social interaction, all the sharing of consumer information really doesn’t make anyone any money until someone actually buys something.

    What it can do is help you know your audience better. All the data served up voluntarily on a daily basis can help you frame a profile of your audience that’s more true to life than what magazines they read or what type of car they drive, and certainly provide more recent information. The combination of social media data and transactional data from retailers can be an unbeatable combination for marketers hoping to know their audience better. The data is available, now you have to figure out how to actualize it, to monetize it, to turn data into dollars.

    The more you know about that target segment and the individuals contained within it, the better you can offer them goods and services they will find appealing. If it’s appealing, they will find a reason to buy it. The simple formula goes: data > knowledge > strategic appeal > purchase > data . . . in a big circle. It’s a good formula to keep in mind, and it feeds into the whole idea of creating a community. What makes a community, in marketing parlance, is that you have a group of individuals who have a reason in common to repeatedly participate in a certain activity, be it buying, or discussing, or learning about  or something involving what you have to offer. The “in common” part makes it efficient to reach them and binds them together. The “repeatedly” part is what connects you to the data acquisition formula, and what gives marketers the “in” to offer them things they find appealing over and over again.

    The real moral of the story is that the better you know your audience, the better you can serve them and the better your marketing will be to them, which in turn adds to your ability to serve them. Go forth and gather data . . . you’ll be glad you indulged your curiosity!

    If you found this information valuable, and would like to read more, be sure and pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”. . .

     

  • Web redesign to meet actual customer needs boosts traffic 94%! Here’s how . . .

    Web redesign to meet actual customer needs boosts traffic 94%! Here’s how . . .

    Thought You’d Enjoy This . . .

    There’s high competition in higher education. Every day, thousands of colleges and universities go head-to-head, vying for prospective students’ enrollments. For today’s digitally savvy youth, school websites must be on their “A” game.

    “For the vast majority of institutions, it’s your No. 1 communication tool,” said Molly Honan, Associate Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Emmanuel College.

    Learn how Emmanuel College’s team collaborated with students and faculty to fuel a website redesign that upped campus visits and deposits while boosting mobile traffic 94%.

    Read the Rest . . .