Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
About this Insider
BrandShift explores key trends in branding such as customer
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help executives and brand managers evolve their brands to thrive in the new
customer-driven marketplace.
Last week, when I was on the road I read Seth Godin’s glowing post on Tom Peter’s crazy schedule. Here’s what Tom had to say about his trip:
So I've been consciously working on a new (for me) approach, with at least a smidgeon of success. Either at day's end or dawn's early light, I have a little meditation and self-counseling session on making the day count, rather than devoting the day to eager anticipation of the moment I can cross it off the calendar. Professionally, that first means looking anew and in depth at the forthcoming lecture to be sure that it clearly encompasses (as best I can) an ennobling purpose, challenges participants' minds and engages their souls. (Will it at least aspire to the JFK idea that no speechifier should utter a word unless she "aims to change the world"?) Also professionally, I "work on" my attitude. This may be day 45 and mile 76,000 for me, but for the Client it is D-Day for an Important Event (often their year's #1 event, for God's sake); hence my exhaustion and accompanying short temper must be thrust aside ... and downright cheeriness and spirited engagement must become the invariant orders of the day. Besides, such cheeriness, even if feigned, cheers me up first and foremost! Next, and in a way most important, even though I have little trouble infusing my lecture with meaning, I must thoroughly convince myself that this is a day every hour of which is worth savoring! Hackneyed though it is to write, 25 October 2005 ain't gonna come around again and this 62-year-old is gonna be a day older and closer to checkout time when it's done.
While I think it’s great that Tom has such a good attitude and I admire both Seth and Tom, something struck me as odd. It could have been that I was tired from being on the road, as well. There is, however, an underlying assumption in the post that no matter how tired you are, you can still give the best performance, every time. I disagree.
As an athlete most of my life, I’ve tried several times to push back standards. In the mid 90’s a friend and I went to Africa to set the world record running up Kilimanjaro. We trained for months, running up and down the mountains in Colorado for up to 10 hours at a time. When we got to Kenya, we spent a week on Kilimanjaro acclimatizing and studying the route. Only after all of this preparation were we ready to make an attempt. We waited for the right day and got lucky. We set the record.
That day I recognized that our peak performance was an alchemy of many things some that we could control, like our training, and others we couldn’t, like conditions on the mountain. I certainly would have never deceived myself that I could have pulled off the record on Kilimanjaro after traveling 76,000 miles over 45 days. I would have given a sub par performance.
The ability to have a truly peak performance in business is similar. My company, Radar Communications, has only hurt long-tem relationships with clients when we accept a job knowing that we are too worn out to do the very best for our client, exceeding their expectations. In today’s business you get only one chance to perform at your peak. If you don’t, you will lose a customer.
Likewise, brands have a habit of communicating their ability to always be on. To be there, waiting to give you the very best performance. Most of the time the “peak performance” message is quickly diluted when the customer starts interacting with the brand by such things as calling to place an order and having to wait too long on the phone or by getting a delivery only to find out half of the items are back-ordered with no communications.
The only way to solve this dilemma of promising a peak performance and delivering something less is to practice the art of saying no. It’s hard to do. Yet, I’ve lost too many clients over the years by trying to stretch our capabilities at Radar too far. I hadn’t trained enough.
I’ve learned that by saying no I can create satisfied non-customers. And, I’d rather have satisfied non-customers than dissatisfied customers, any day.
How much more satisfied would Tom’s customers have been if he had said no once or twice and traveled only 33,000 miles?
John Winsor wrote a post here a couple weeks ago titled "Ignore the Consumer?". He quotes a recent Ad Age article:
Companies spend billions on market research to divine the needs and wants of consumers and businesses. Yet the new-product failure rate remains high. And we’re not coming up with better product concepts by listening to the voice of the customer. Why? Maybe the customer isn’t worth listening to.
John comments:
Innovation can spring from any part of the company-customer community, but ONLY if the support and encouragement for this environment exists at every level of the business.... When involving customers, be sure to think about inspiration and not reliance.
My personal philosophy on customer involvement is this: Find out what they want. Then figure out how to deliver it. Customers should be involved in "need identification"... or as John puts it, they should serve as the inspiration. But it's the company's job to figure out the best, most cost-effective solution to that need.
I was thinking about innovation this morning when making my breakfast burritos. I'd purchased Mission brand tortillas... ugh. I'll never buy them again. Not because the tortillas taste bad, but because they didn't put plastic sheets in between each tortilla so they wouldn't stick to each other. You can just picture the brand manager's scratching his or her head, trying to find out why they're losing market share... doing taste tests and evaluating product placement. And all the while, it's because of some silly little plastic sheets that make customers' lives easier.
Two insights from my Mission tortilla fiasco this morning:
- Brands that aren't in touch with their customers miss out on small but critical innovation opportunities.
- Brands that seek customer insight only along predetermined lines of thinking (like taste tests) can easily miss out on the real opportunities (like plastic sheets).
Have you connected with your customers lately? Have you allowed yourself to be surprised by a need you hadn't foreseen?
We’ve heard so much over the last few years about developing your own personal brand, yet so many people are unaware of how their day-to-day actions effect the brands they work for.
A recent experience only highlighted the issue. I was flying to Los Angeles last week, sitting in an isle seat. As the door was closing, a woman got on the plane with three carry-ons, her lunch from McDonalds and magazines under her arm all the while talking loudly on her cell phone.
Instead of hanging up the phone and taking her seat, she tried to throw the magazines and McDonalds’ bag onto her seat while yelling at her assistant on the phone. Not surprisingly, the magazines and the Big Mac ended up on my lap! And, she wasn’t even aware of anything that was happening because she was so focused on her call.
While the woman took her seat, the stewardess had to remind her twice to turn off her phone.
Just when I thought things would mellow out, she turned to me and launched into a diatribe about how she was overworked and underappreciated, while eating her Big Mac and flipping through her magazines.
The only thing I could think about was my loss of respect for the Fortune 500 Company she worked for. The company had just lost a potential customer because of one executive’s unrelated actions.
Whether we like it or not, everything we do reflects on the companies we work for and either attracts repels customers.
Not to my surprise, as the plane landed, my neighbor once again was on the phone yelling at her assistant!
Jennifer Rice has a nice post about buzzwords on her blog. The post made me think about marketing buzzwords that get under my skin me. One of them is ‘metrosexuals.’ Here's what I wrote in Beyond the Brand:
It’s human nature to use words as a way to classify other people’s actions or behaviors. Whether its right or wrong, we all categorize people at times. Companies, and especially their marketing departments, do the same thing. A recent popular example of how words can be appropriated is the term ‘metrosexual.’ Marketers now use this term to describe sensitive, image-conscious guys.
“Their heightened sense of aesthetics is very, very pronounced,” Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer at Euro RSCG(now at JWT), said of ‘metrosexuals.’ “They are the style makers. It doesn’t mean your average Joe American is going to copy everything they do,” she added. “But unless you study these guys you don’t know where Joe American is heading.”
It is somewhat ironic that gay writer Mark Simpson originally coined the term ‘metrosexual’ to mock everything marketers stood for. In the mid-1990’s, Simpson used the word to satirize the way that brands and consumer culture promoted the idea of a sensitive guy: one who shopped, used products for his personal appearance, and read magazines like Men’s Health.
Simpson felt that consumerism had taken its toll on traditional masculinity. From his point of view, men really didn’t go to shopping malls, use personal-care products or read self-help magazines. It was all a fantasy propagated by marketers.
A couple of days ago Salzman told the New York Tmes that her promotion of 'metrosexuals' was all a ruse to sell books:
While identifying a tribe of ‘metrosexuals’ ostensibly helped marketers reach that market, Ms. Salzman said her purpose was to sell her book. When the three authors' previous book, "Buzz: Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand," was published in spring 2003, "we wanted to prove our own hypothesis, that you could buzz something around the world without paying for advertising."
Salzman and co-authors Ira Matathia and Ann O'Reilly have written a new book, "The Future of Men," they say the new ideal is the "übersexual."
The authors state that unlike metrosexuals, "übersexuals don't invite questions about their sexuality." They also produced a list of the "top 10 übersexuals," including Bono, George Clooney and Bill Clinton.
Ahhhh....I'm so confused! Who am I supposed to be? A metrosexual or an ubersexual? How about if I'm just me?
Companies should be hesitant to ascribe general classifications to their customers. While many times a label does a fair job of describing its target population, individual characteristics are completely subject to interpretation. Relying on a simplistic descriptive tool to give life to someone as important as a customer, or potential customer, is dangerous.
If you really want to know your customers; stop using labels and get out of your office and spend time in the context of their lives. Once you start understanding your customers as people, you can avoid the need to develop or depend on such generalized labels that seem to change in the whims of fashion.
I was intrigued when I opened Advertising Age’s Point Magazine in September to find an article by Michael Treacy entitled, Ignore The Consumer. Here’s what Michael has to say:
Companies spend billions on market research to divine the needs and wants of consumers and businesses. Yet the new-product failure rate remains high. And we’re not coming up with better product concepts by listening to the voice of the customer. Why? Maybe the customer isn’t worth listening to.
While I appreciate Michael’s point-of-view, it is often not that customers lead an innovation effort astray. Many times, internal agendas and politics get in the way of true innovation.
While we can all point out innovation in marketing and product development as springing from the brilliance of one mind – Treacy uses the oft cited iPod as his primary example – the truth is that most innovation happens when co-creation is at the center of the innovation process for a brand. That means involving not only the internal resources of the company and a team charged with innovating, but also the external resources of the culture and the customers.
In my upcoming book, Spark, I had a chance to interview a number of leaders in innovation including, Mark Parker of Nike, Marsha Skidmore of Herman Miller and Rob Bon Durant of Patagonia. These interviews only reinforced my belief that there is no formulaic process, but the need to take a more holistic, co-creative approach to brand innovation with out excluding anyone, including customers.
For a team charged with innovation, try to remember to allow everybody, no matter the level of knowledge, to participate in a positive dialogue. Likewise, develop a policy of more open communication, dialogue, connectivity and equality. Remember to focus on learning and experience versus accomplishments.
In regards to the company as a whole, it’s important to remember that innovation is not necessarily a top-down process but the necessary support and nurturing must absolutely be top-down. Innovation can spring from any part of the company-customer community, but ONLY if the support and encouragement for this environment exists at every level of the business. Remember to learn from failure, reduce bureaucracy and encourage companywide communication.
When involving customers, be sure to think about inspiration and not reliance. It’s all about progression. And progression is based on immersion. People inside the company need to stop sitting at their desks and get out to spend time with their customers in the context of their lives. Take a chance and strive to become an inspired protagonist in the market. Have fun by creating a culture inside the company that mirrors the customers’ culture. Nourish the playful interaction between the company and customers.
In interactions with the culture that surrounds a company, think about leveraging relationships with suppliers in more innovative ways. Develop new ways to engage with the community. Remember, you’ll never be able to manage it or control it. Participate in it. Make use of new tools, like blogging, to interact with your culture. Allow the culture to create innovation with the company.
Only by taking a more holistic, co-creative approach that takes into account all constituents can brands be more innovative in their marketing and product design and thrive in this competitive environment in which we all exist.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
