Rethinking Customer Loyalty

Posted on March 15, 2010
Categories: Differentiation, Engagement, Experimentation, Marketing, Relationships | Start the Conversation

I’m paraphrasing any number of management gurus here:

If you want to be good enough, focus on shoring up your weaknesses. If you want to be extraordinary, forget your weaknesses and focus on building up your strengths.

The idea was proposed in the context of how to become extraordinary at whatever it is you do, and in the context of how to evaluate your performance at work.

But why do we not apply the same principle to the corporation and what it does for its customers?

Most of us are – or at least we claim to be – obsessed with customer satisfaction and loyalty. We want our customers to love us and to keep coming back.

So we ask, generally in a survey. Every time a customer wants to leave us (you’re lucky if you’re in a renewal or subscription-based business – your customers have to tell you they want to leave) we ask “Why?” and we learn something about what we’ve done wrong (or what our competition has done right).

Some companies go so far as to try to keep a customer from leaving (think telephone carriers and credit card issuers). I’m sure you’ve had the experience of trying to cancel your service and being sent to the “retention department” who then tries, essentially, to bribe you to stay – and take an offer attractive enough to put up with whatever they did that caused you to want to leave in the first place.

What if, instead of working to fix all the reasons customers left us, we worked on doing even more of what made customers stay?

If you already do that, congratulations. You probably have raving fans for customer. If you don’t, then it’s time to get started.

Start by asking your most loyal (not your biggest, your most loyal) customers why they stick around and keep coming back. I’m pretty sure the reasons will look very little like the reasons other customers leave.

Then ask a group of your customers who are not all that loyal,  but seem to stick around (or come back now and then) anyway: Why are they not all that loyal (probably the same reasons others leave) and why do they come back (probably the same reasons your most loyal customers stay).

Now comes the hard work: Focus on getting better at your strengths. Strengths are the reasons your most loyal customers stay.

Figure out what you are doing right in every single aspect of how you relate to your most loyal customers and do more of it. Refine it, improve it and make it the best in the business, bar none.

And forget about your weaknesses. Weaknesses are the reasons those customers hate you and don’t want to do business with you any more.

Yes, you will find that more unhappy customers will come out of the woodwork. They’ll complain, wondering why you don’t seem to want their business any more.

In fact, you don’t. You cannot be all things to all people, so be what you are good at being and stop trying to be what you are not (feel free to insert your own rant about authenticity here). Letting a group of customers (read: paying customers) go can be scary, but the focus and the new customers you gain will be worth it.

Doing this will also help you define what type of customer is good for your business and what type isn’t. It will give you a different (you might find, better) way to segment your market, and you’ll find that the core of your new segment is much more profitable than the old, less appropriate, segments.

And you’ll find that you end up not only with customers who are more loyal, but they’ll all tell their friends (and colleagues) and you’ll probably end up with even more customers who become just as loyal.

And your (new) customers will become your raving fans.

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I promised myself I wouldn’t, but…

Posted on February 22, 2010
Categories: Experience, Rant, Relationships, Responsibility, Technology | Start the Conversation

This is a bit of a rant. And not a really important one at that. But it seems to me that there are things companies do that impose themselves on their “customers” and, in this case, their “customers’” “customers.”  The culprit in this case is Technorati and, that one thing is:

E824C4B7QWEY

I feel responsible to those of you who take your valuable time to read my writings to make those writings worthy of your time and discuss issues that have the potential to make a real difference. In this case, all I did was change the URL of this blog (did you notice?). And to convince Technorati that it is still my blog (no, they can’t see the new URL, even though Google can) they require that I publicly post that random string of characters for them to find in my blog feed (not even directly on my blog!).

This means they are forcing me to post this for all of you to read also. So instead of just posting a cryptic post with those random characters, I thought I should at least explain. And no, I don’t have a good mystery novel in me, so while it might be a good start, I’ll leave it to more talented folks to go beyond the first sentence.

This is quite an imposition compared to Google. When they wanted proof of ownership, they asked for a tag in the blog’s header, something easily accomplished and invisible to RSS readers and human readers alike. It’s quite the comparison that Technorati wants me to impose their (rather outdated) technology on you, my readers.

The question I draw from this is along the same lines as my last post about Ford Motor Company: Are you being responsible to your customers if you are imposing on their relationship with their customers (when you can avoid it)?

It seems clear to me why, in the past few years, Technorati has lost trust as an on-line authority and Google has stepped in to fill the gap.

So, Technorati, can you read my code now?

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Ford Takes a Not-so-Small step Toward Responsibility

Posted on February 15, 2010
Categories: Innovation, Responsibility, Sustainability | Start the Conversation

Yesterday, The Detriot Free Press reported that Ford dealers are taking part in a pilot program offered by the company to help those dealers reduce their environmental impact. The report highlighted the reductions in energy use and the resulting cost decrease that the dealers are likely to see from adopting this program, but at the same time only glanced at a more interesting point.

There is a growing sentiment (and the subject of another discussion) that the ideas and implementations of environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility are not only different faces of the same issue, but that they are – or at least should be – central to the way a corporation does business. This is a significant shift from the more traditional model of these two being just functions – and marginalized functions at that – somewhere in a staff department.

Part of what it means to be a responsible corporation is how you act outside your own walls – with your customers, partners and other stakeholders. And from the standpoint of environmental and business responsibility, “acting well” includes (maybe means entirely?) helping your partner and customers (and in this case dealers) do a better job of serving their customers and becoming more responsible themselves.

This may be a relatively small (for now) and obvious program that Ford is launching. But it’s hard for me not to notice that a company that by its very products contributes to environmental damage, is not just taking steps to reduce its own impact, but to help its dealers reduce theirs.

And helping them save money and be better neighbors in the process (which can only help them gain more customers – or at least fans).

This is one example of what looks to be a small but growing trend toward taking slightly larger steps toward sustainability, responsibility and a building a better business by being both.

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Is the “Age of Conversation” Coming of Age?

Posted on January 21, 2010
Categories: conversation, Engagement, Establishment, Innovation, Marketing, Relationships, Technology | 1 Comment

It’s a bit like that “fool me once…” adage: When the second observation showed up this week, I started wondering if this is a trend. Then I realized it’s inevitable.

There are few people left (at least among those with internet access) that would dispute that, in the past decade or so, technology has changed the way we interact with and relate to each other. Whether you call this the “Age of Conversation” or refer more generally to the social media/social networking trends, it’s been clear for some time that the skills of technology have been applied to the art of human relationships, and how those relationships manifest has changed.

Another point that few would argue is that the social media/social networking phenomenon has changed the way corporate – actually, all – marketers see the world and related to and communicate with their target audiences. Even the simple use of the phrase “communicate with” in the previous sentence is symptomatic of the change – 15 years ago I would have said “communicate to.”

I found it interesting when two unrelated experiences began to triangulate (yes, I’ll still need a third to fully triangulate – care to offer one in the comments?) on these ideas.

  1. Over an otherwise social dinner, a friend who is a successful CMO told me he’s thinking of leaving his position to start an agency. When I pressed him for the reason he wanted to do this after many years working in corporate organizations, he said “Marketers have forgotten how to market.” He explained (and I mostly agree) that most marketers have become so caught up in the social media trend and have focused on a long list of not-well-developed-conventional-wisdom approached and tactics, that some of the fundamentals – like knowing how to segment a market, understand basic customer needs, and focusing on messages (read: content) that is of critical interest to your customers and prospects – have been lost in the shuffle, or worse, forgotten.

  2. I watched a Tom Peters video that talked about the importance of being able to write well and coherently (you can judge for yourself if I’ve mastered that skill). Yes, the very same Tom Peters who is always ranting about big strategic ideas and the importance of challenging the status quo, is now talking about a very basic skill in which most of us became at least moderately proficient in high school. His explanation for this is that in the age of quick e-mails, facebook statuses (statii?) and Twitter, where writing is reduced to the fewest characters possible and sentence structure gives way to compact meaning, being able to communicate well and coherently is still a highly valued skill. In fact, good communication – including written – skills are critical for business success (his new book, in fact, focuses on the importance of the so-called “little things”). I would add that for marketers, being able to express yourself well rather than briefly (in most cases), makes it more likely that your audience will understand your message.

A return to fundamentals is the core idea that ties these two observations together. Good marketing is, well, good marketing, no matter the tools, channels, media or relationships. The core elements of understanding how to relate to your audience and how to get a message across in a way that is compelling and results in action (presumably buying, but not always), along with the rest of the basic marketing tenets, are still the things we must do right every day to make sure that, whether in old or new or social media, we can be effective communicators. The same is true of the basic skill of written communications (admit it, you love reading blogs – obvious, because you’re reading this – but you know that so many are poorly written, and sometimes hard to decipher).

I would never make the argument that the so-called “revolution” in the nature of the relationships among people and between companies and their audiences is coming to an end. In fact, I’d argue that it’s only just begun (but I won’t argue that right now – maybe later). Relationships must and will change, and they will change dramatically.

We are no longer at the point where we are experimenting with what the new tools can do. We have reached the point where we’ve played with the new tools and now we have to go start finding out not only what they can do, but where they are useful and how to make them a part of our own lives, our own professions and our own relationship. Then we have to use them to redefine and rebuild those lives, professions and relationships in ways we may not fully understand.

As we do, we should not forget that we still have lives, professions and relationships, and the need to do the simple things right – to live lives, to practice professions and to relate to others – and to do them well has not changed, and I don’t think it ever will.

Add your story about how you see good fundamentals returning to blend with a radically changed world in the comments

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Change of Control

Posted on August 8, 2009
Categories: creativity, Decision Making, Experimentation, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Relationships | Start the Conversation

It’s often the simplest things that make all the difference.

This article by Gary Hamel describes the seemingly incredible effects of allowing local and front-line employees to make decisions on how best to serve the customers with whom they interacted every day, rather than listening to a standard coming from the central corporate office, which had the effect of not quite serving any customer particularly well.

It has a very powerful story which illustrates three important points:

One: It’s an excellent lesson in experimentation, focusing on what the customer really needs and wants and, what I think was Professor Hamel’s point, how to run a better business by changing the way you treat your people.

Two:It reinforces the fact that your brand is not what you define it to be, but rather it exists in the mind of those who know you and are your customers. In this case, looking at the definition of “reliability” from the perspective of the customer completely changed the practices that helped support the reputation.

Here’s what intrigued me:

Three: It’s the second underlying theme in the story that makes it so compelling: The changes, the innovation, the tremendous increase in customer service and profitability all happened because someone (according to this, a few people at a time) made the decision to give up centralized control and trust employees to use their judgement and do what is best for the business on their own volition – and most importantly to use their own intelligence and motivation to improve the business at every opportunity.

This was a shift for this particular company, and might well be for yours, in the relationship between the company (and its management) and its employees.

What would happen if we made the same shift in our relationship with the people in our market (customers and everyone else)?

What might happen if we stopped telling our market what to think about our companies and how they should relate to us?

As marketers, we are trained to do market research, find market positions with large opportunity, and spend time, money and resources making sure everyone think of us what we want them to.

One side effect of this is that we may not serve any of our customers particularly well (to reference a common example, I’d prefer a car that is safe, forward-thinking and “hot” but brand-reputation at least, I get to pick one).

This story is one from which we can learn.

Please read it.

Then think about what you are doing that is stopping your people from having the freedom to build a new customer relationship.And what you need to do to make that job easier for them. (can you provide templates to print opening hours instead of dictating them?)

Then go one step further: how can you enable your customers to build the relationship they want with you and get the service from you that suits them best?

I am fairly certain that even simple steps will dramatically improve your customer relationships and put you miles ahead of your competition in your relationship with the rest of the market.

Take a step now.

Discuss it here. I’d love to hear what you’ve tried and how it worked.

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Long-Distance Romance

Posted on August 3, 2009
Categories: Brand, Community, conversation, Engagement, Innovation, Relationships | Start the Conversation

If a marketer’s dream is to have an intimate relationship with and knowledge of his or her customer, then that marketer’s worst nightmare must be to know nothing about the customers who they so fervently hope will buy whatever it is they are selling.

In what I consider an inconsistent, if not surprising move, the FCC announced recently (via BusinessWeek) that it was going to look into what is becoming a fairly common marketing practice: tracking potential buyers’ web browsing behaviors and patterns.

How is this inconsistent? This administration prides itself on populism, and more specifically, enabling people to take power and control over themselves and allow opportunities to create all kinds of value. (I feel an argument coming on here…maybe next post? or in the comments if you like). This moves stops them. It simply puts up an artificial barrier that says “what I do, how I act and what I create on-line cannot be shared.”

Huh? Isn’t the populist, Web2.0 world of the internet all about creating shared value? What ever happened to the pro-sumer? and since when do my browsing patterns, along with what I create from them, not my “production?” (could you even go so far as to argue that link streams – mine here – are a proud publication of at least some of where I’ve been? and could be considered a lite version of a browser tracker? maybe).

But the point isn’t the politics. It’s the marketing.

For generations, companies have marketed to demographic, ethnographic, psychographic segments (and more…) trying to find the common behaviors of their potential buyers (in my now-distant youth, I recall ads for Cheerios in racquet clubs…clearly assuming a connection between racquet sports and a desire to eat healthy). Cross-marketing campaigns, partnerships, and so forth have been a staple of good marketing as long as there has been good marketing.

With the proper cautions, warning and knowledge (and willing participation of the potential buyer), tracking web browsing habit is no different. It tells us as marketers what our potential customers might be interested in, what they are looking at, and ultimately, where we should focus our efforts and with whom we should team up to best find and engage our potential buyer.

Wait - I know you’re about to argue for the right to privacy. Yes, obviously. None of this should be done surreptitiously. It probably should have the same level of user control and awareness as cookies do now. It feels about the same. Chime in if you like on the privacy controls needed.

Here’s where the nightmare begins:

Consumers, and for the most part business buyers, are on-line. They are browsing, searching, shopping and so forth. We all know the social media adage “The conversation is out there, are you?” The same applies to your potential customer. They are on-line. Are you looking for them?

If consumer behavior in the mass-market society could be done with cross-marketing campaigns and consumer habits determined (at least in aggregate) by survey, then consumer behavior in the social market must be determined by where your potential market (of one person) is going, who they are associating with, etc.

As a marketer, you cannot even begin to know your potential customer without knowing these things (and there’s so much more).

If you were not allowed to find ways to trace the patterns of an individual’s behavior on-line, you cannot know that person in the way you need to in order to make relevant and useful products available.

You would be relegated to doing nothing more than shooting the proverbial arrow in the dark. And that’s any marketer’s nightmare.

So what about the potential customer?

No, I would not want the feeling of being watched. But I do like to share what I’m doing and what I see. (e.g. this blog, my LinkStream, my tweets, etc.) But I also hate all that useless advertising I see.

So what if I set my browser to allow some set of marketing companies to see some set of information about my browsing habits (say, purchases, shopping, searches, abandoned shopping carts, etc.)? I’d get useful information (with, I hope relevant ads). I’d be able to see more of what I care about, even if it is promotional.

I would appreciate those companies that took the time to invest in thinking about me and what I do and like before they came to me and made me an offer. I’d be much more likely to buy.

I would be creating opportunities for me to find, discover and learn, and, yes, buy. And I’d be much more inclined to join the brand that did all of this.

This unusual move would, in one fell swoop, take a significant bite out of the rapidly evolving buyer-seller relationship, and drastically change the course of the new developing social marketplace.

As a consumer, and as a marketer, I seek out opportunities to create and strengthen relationships with those I buy from and those I sell to. I hope the FTC doesn’t send me back to the industrial age of the mass blast and the 1.5% return.

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Dropping the 80

Posted on July 31, 2009
Categories: creativity, Decision Making, Innovation, Leadership | Start the Conversation

Earlier this week, my friend @morganm pointed me to this post from TechCrunch that talked about a hypothetical future for the New York Times. Essentially, they propose that the top 20% of the New York Times reporters should walk out and form their own journalism outlet.

I agree – we’d all subscribe (though we’d have to wonder if it would be free), No offense to the other 80% likely-very-competent people, but these 20% are the ones who give the Times that edge that makes it different, better and to many the gold standard of American journalism. The Times might well be just another local paper without them.

So? The same is true of most companies, organizations, or any other entity. And just to be clear, I mean the top 20% of contributors, creators, innovators, performers, not the 20% with the highest ranks.

I felt compelled to ask: What would happen if you (and your fellow “top 20%” colleagues) did just that – walked out and made a more nimble, leaner, focused organization to compete with your now-former organization?

My guess is you’d run circles around your now-former organization and all of its other competitors. You’d be small, fast and expert. You’d have none of the weight of the organization to hold you back. You’d be creative, drive innovation and help your customers – by whatever definition you have them – succeed.

This begs some really difficult organizational questions, like do the top 20% of performers rely on the day-to-day work of the other 80% to allow them to do the things that make them top 20%? The more that’s true, the less likely this idea is to succeed.

Morgan asked me if I thought this applied as well to manufacturing companies as to media. I don’t know, but I suspect not. I suspect this small nimble entity might be really good at sales, marketing and design, but probably needs to other 80% to actually build something (you could outsource to them, but you still need them).

I subscribe to the theory that companies and work units are getting smaller and more nimble and must do so just to continue to survive in the developing new economy.

So I spent the past few days thinking about what it would look like if I took my favorite 20% of people from my organization and went and created something really cool centered around a new kind of relationship with our customers. And I realized we’d do some amazing things.

Then I thought, why can’t I just do that now? Take those same people, recruit them into a project team (this would look very different in a different size or type of organization) and make the same really cool things happen. (I’m proud to say I’ve actually done this more than a few times).

The answer: I can. More importantly, so can you.

I believe that if this becomes the norm, it is part of what will create the new, sustainable economy.

So now I’ll ask: What if you were to take your best 20% of the people you know, work with, etc. What could you do? And how can you make that happen right now?

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Not Just Hammers

Posted on July 20, 2009
Categories: Community, conversation, Engagement, Marketing, Relationships | Start the Conversation

A journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but you don’t get very far unless you take the second step (and then the third, and the fourth and so on…)

Not long ago I was having dinner with a friend who also spends time supporting not-for-profits and we were lamenting how hard it can be to get people in general (the general public, mass audiences, whatever you want to call it) to do the (sometimes simple) things it takes to make a big difference in the world, whether in human services, environmental protection or any number of other fields.

Which is the same challenge marketers face every day – how to get people to act, or specifically, express interest and buy.

How is this the same thing? When we talk about lead generation, demand generation, the marketing funnel, prospect and customer engagement and any number of other terms we use to describe the parts of the journey from first prospect contact to closed sale and beyond, we are really describing a journey of increasing commitment by the buyer to the seller (and, I hope by both to the on-going relationship)

Let me offer this as a way to think about the development of the buyer-seller relationship:

Start with Awareness. Someone in the market becomes aware that we offer a product or service that he or she may need. From the seller’s point-of-view, we become aware that there is a group of potential buyers in a target audience. One example of how we make this happen is advertising.

Then we move to Interest. That same prospect has determined that there is a potential that our offerings may meet some needs and is willing to explore further. We see positive response to our communication (regardless of vehicle) and become interested in pursuing the potential buyer. We provide information, marketing offers and other ways to engage and get this information.

Next is Motivation. Now the prospect has determined that she has a motivating need and that our offering can help. He or she now actively wants to pursue a purchase. And we see the possibility of turning the developing relationship into a source of revenue. We might offer a sales call.

And then comes Action. The prospect buys. We sell. We deliver.

Finally, at that point we have a developed Relationship. The customer wants to succeed with our offering, we want the same. We provide help and support to make that happen and cultivate on-going sales and other offers as we learn about more needs.

Granted, there’s a bit more complexity here and we all know it’s never that linear. And you probably label your process and funnel stages quite differently, but I have not found many people who’d disagree that Motivation precedes Action, that Interest precedes Motivation or that Awareness precedes Interest. It might all happen in an instant (think about the last time you bought a candy bar at a grocery store register display – “there’s chocolate”, “I like that”, “I’m hungry/craving”, “I’ll buy one”, granted not much of an on-going relationship there if you don’t count, as Ms. Morgenstern would have called it, the relationship between the chocolate and your hips!)

So, now back to the problem.

The problem, remember, is getting people to take the actions they might know are right, beneficial or helpful. For example, we know that recycling is good for the environment, but most of us don’t recycle much of what we could. The same can be said about the other small shifts we can all take to improve the environment, better support the not-for-profits we choose and act in a number of other ways that seems obvious to us (side note: I now see that this is true of preventative healthcare as much as sustainability)

I’ll spare this rant, but please consider there to be a long set of paragraphs aiming to debunk the economic view of people as rational beings and that all of this is a result of utility maximization. Suffice to say, it’s not.

Let’s look at how we convince people to do green acts, and participate in (volunteer, donate) not-for-profits.

Many not-for-profits (this is particularly true with ones focused on diseases and serving the under-privileged) try to generate Awareness. They want people to know about the cause or problem.

That’s an admirable goal, and an important step. But not nearly enough.

Once I know about your cause, why you think it’s important and how big the problem is (usually what I hear from these organizations), now I need a reason to move to interest. At this point, I am more likely than not to say something on the order of “that’s nice, I hope you solve that problem” and move on.

What we leave to chance is Interest, Motivation and Action.

So why don’t many organizations succeed at these steps? Mostly from not having built tools. Often, the question is asked “OK, I’m ready and willing – what do I do?” and without the tools in place, action is not possible

No sales organization would consider trying to get a prospect emotionally charged about their offering then just sit back and expect the prospect to show up with a contract, check, cash, whatever, in hand. There’s a process, there are tools there are specific actions every sales rep takes and tools they use to give their prospects as many tools as possible to close the deal.

Not-for-profits can learn a lot from their commercial counterparts.

And dare I say, many of those commercial counterparts can learn a lot about where their marketing is missing a step just by looking at their customer’s journey and on what parts they are not partnering.

I know from my work in sustainability and not-for-profits that we have lots of problems that need to be solved. Now.

I also know most of them don’t look like nails. But let me suggest that we at least start showing people how to get hammers. And whatever other tools they need.

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Stop Circling the Wagons

Posted on March 22, 2009
Categories: Brand, conversation, Decision Making, Differentiation, Establishment, Innovation, Leadership, Management | Start the Conversation

This past week I had the privilege of attending The Economist’s 2009 Marketing Forum. As you might expect, the topics this year were focused on managing through challenging economic times, how to prepare for what we all hope will be better times in the near future and how we might know when better times are coming.

The audience was smaller than in past years, which was not at all surprising, but still represented the marketing leadership of a diverse set of companies and organizations – enough so that it was not hard to see how different sectors and industries are faring, and how the thinking differs – or doesn’t – across these businesses. (you can read more on the twitter stream, some commentary on it from day one and day two and read another perspective on the conference)

I heard discussion of the expected topics, such as measurement, marketing mix and spending and investment allocation, plus branding, promotion, channels and the long list of things marketers think about. But after a day and one-half listening to and talking with this group of marketing leaders, there were two things that were notably missing.

I’m pretty sure that if you’re bothering to read this, you don’t need to be convinced that an economic downturn, regardless of how severe or prolonged, is the time when it is imperative that great companies (read: the ones that want to survive) innovate – not just creating a few new, related products, but re-think the way they relate to their customers and the rest of their market, they way they develop and roll-out product (I am intentionally avoiding the word “launch” here) and how they manage the marketing investment for their companies.

I won’t suggest that there were no interesting ideas offered. There were a few. But out of 12 panels and presentations, not one was focused on innovation in marketing or how companies can create the kind of significant differentiation that will allow them to succeed in bad times and dominate when the market turns up again.

I would hate to suggest that, among this group, not one person was thinking about how to do this for their company (or clients for the branding firms in attendance), but there was little to no talk of this, either on stage or in the hallway between sessions. The thing that struck me also, is how much of the conversation still assumes that marketers own and define their brand themselves (hint: your market owns your brand) and how much the style of thinking is still command-and-control-driven in most marketing organizations.

So what was missing? Let me start with these perspectives:

This is the opportunity that faces us in this challenging market. William Pearce of Del Monte Foods suggested that one of the key responsibilities of the CMO is to be the “driver of growth” – and with that comes the challenge of how to put your company in position to lead the market (and gain market share) in challenging times and to accelerate out of this downturn, leave your competition in the dust and become dominant in your market.

Your market is thinking differently about its relationship with you – and your competitors. Are you willing to do what it takes to enter into a new relationship, start to think differently about how your company operates and markets, and become the organization that everyone else wishes they were?

I hope so – and I’d like to hear how you are getting started.

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Just Ask

Posted on February 27, 2009
Categories: Brand, Community, conversation, Engagement, Establishment, Items of Interest, Management, Marketing, Sales, Twitter | 3 Comments

At this morning’s Social Media Breakfast (great discussion with Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0 on using social media in sales), I was talking with Sue of KITList and Clare about how to improve the conversation and engagement of the thousands and thousands of KITList members. The three of us wrestled with updating the blog, creating an e-mail discussion list, maybe a social media service presence (Facebook, Twitter?), but we weren’t really sure what would engage the large and very diverse group that is the KITList membership. Then came the “a-ha” moment:

Clare said “Why don’t you ask your members?”

Which is, of course, applying the basic social media principle to figuring out social media.

Marketers are always working hard to understand customers, prospects and future prospects better. We think we’re pretty good at asking people in our market what they think, want and need. We also think we’re pretty good at translating often disparate answers into a coherent theme that then, we hope, guides our strategy.

Where this morning’s conversation started was in the “market research” mode of asking a few people. Sue asked me and Clare, and told us she had asked a few others, but still had no good answers. So a few hours later, she wrote a blog post (and sent an e-mail) to the members and asked everyone.

A few hours later, I saw the news that Facebook, after the recent debacle, has now decided that changes to their terms of service will be open to discussion by all members and subject to vote of the membership (Can’t you hear the lawyers cringing?). A social media icon now adopts real social media practices in a way that much of the technology industry is proverbially famous for not doing for so many years. This means no more misunderstandings (we hope) and terms of service that the community of Facebook members actually wants to abide by (I’ll refrain from a rant on the use of self-interest as a motivator being better than the threat of lawsuit). Facebook is actually asking everyone, and the result is almost certain to be a service that’s more appealing to its members.

Not everyone will answer. But I can’t think of a better example of how to learn what your whole market thinks, and not just the select few you’ve chosen for research. This is not quite crowdsourcing, but it’s close, and it uses some of the same ideas about collecting opinions from many, many individuals.

So when you want to know what your customers, prospects and market really want and need (and I hope you always want to know), do you let a select few speak for everyone? or do you really ask – everyone?

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Your most important question

Posted on February 21, 2009
Categories: Brand, conversation, Decision Making, Marketing | Start the Conversation

It would have been hard to miss the turmoil surrounding the change a few weeks back in Facebook‘s terms of service. It appeared that they had changed the terms so that Facebook now owned complete rights in perpetuity (or something similar) to anything and everything anyone has ever posted or ever will post on Facebook.

It shocked some people that anyone noticed. But if you’ve been in the social media world or in on-line communities at all in the past decade, you know there are always at least a few people watching out and ready to pounce on anything that even smells like a usurpation of individual rights, freedom or privacy. (personal note: a really good analysis of this and what it means for the future is in Jonathan Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it).

And, as one might have expected, once the individual shouts turned into a roar, and the mainstream news media (and even NPR and Harvard Law) picked up the story, Facebook backed off, and retracted the changes.

Facebook explained the intent of the changes by saying they had “revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users” and that the changes were intended to do things like make sure people knew that if they posted, say, a picture on a group, then canceled their Facebook account, but the group still existed, then the picture would stay posted on the group.

Makes sense to me. Unfortunately, what they actually said, didn’t seem to mean that – and certainly wasn’t taken that way by the chorus of users who called for the recission of the changes.

Full credit to Facebook, by the way, for listening.

OK, now to my point. I don’t know if Facebook actually did any market research or any form of listening to their users in this case, but this is an all-too-common situation that marketers face: We listen to our market, then we act on what we think we heard. All good, right?

Well, frankly, no.

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. was famous for one admonition to his employees that became the informal motto of IBM: “Think” I remember in my younger days visiting IBM offices, and nearly everyone had a plaque on their desk with this single word embossed on it.

IBM Think Sign

 

That’s what Facebook forgot. And that’s what we see marketers forget a bit too often. Forget the groupthink that got you to the decision to act. Forget the assumptions you make every day. Forget the facts and data. Forget the market research and all the pithy quotes you garnered from your customers.

Take just a few minutes. Pretend you actually are one of your customers hearing for the first time about whatever you plan to do (not sure how to do this? ask an aspiring-actor friend – I know you have at least one!).

What do you think? What’s your reaction? What’s your initial feeling or what action might this inspire. Be honest here. This is the marketing equivalent of the gut check.

In other words: Think. What would your (prospective) customer really think about this?

That’s your most important question.

If it passes that test, then act, knowing your (prospective) customers won’t react with “What were they thinking?”

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I had to ask

Posted on February 21, 2009
Categories: Marketing | Start the Conversation

I don’t know if these ads run in your part of the world, but Jimmy Dean (the sausage people) are running a series of ads here featuring, well, weather – starring (pun, I assume, intended) the Sun, with a less-than-full moon (who becomes full after eating one of the advertised products, fog, and rainbow.

Rainbow is shades of grey (rather than colors) thanks to a special diet (again, solved by eating the advertised product).

Here’s my question: Are you, like me ever since I saw the ad, walking around humming Paul Simon’s My Little Town?

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Improvement and Change

Posted on January 13, 2008
Categories: Engagement, Experience, Experimentation, Marketing | 5 Comments

I learned something from my last few posts: The people who read this blog like to respond by e-mail. OK, maybe I’m generalizing based on just a few events (e-mails in response to posts), but I do get e-mail, and I don’t get many comments.

I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” likes to engage. But what I did was, on a small scale, the kind of experiment in which marketers engage every day: Put something out into a market or segment and see how people respond. Do the same thing (at the same time) to comparable but different versions of the same “thing” (offer, message, whatever) in different but comparable markets or segments and you’ll end up with a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Marketers do this all the time. And, I hope, as a result they improve how they talk to their market.

Marketers (and, I’ve noticed, many companies) are not as good at the kind of experimentation that creates change. It’s really not that different. Experiment with things you have not yet tried. Try a new medium for communication – outbound, inbound or (preferably) two-way. Try a few all at once. See if any work. Maybe try a structure to a program, or create something in your market that’s never been created before. It might not work, but it might, and even if it doesn’t, you’ve learned something about having the conversation with your market that your current structure would never have allowed you to learn.

Using simple methods, like piloting, controlled experiments, and allowing the emergence of what works and what doesn’t, this type of experimentation can be successful in almost every organization. And when you learn what works, and then work to improve it, you create the kind of marketing innovation that puts you ahead of your competition.

Why does this matter? I will refrain from beating the now-tired drum of “the market is changing” (which really means your buyer is changing) – we all know it’s true, and will continue to be. If you’re trying the same things over and over again (even if you are improving them every time), you will become irrelevant.

Why does it matter now? In the past year, I’ve seen several companies start to see their marketing effectiveness eroding, only because they won’t (or don’t know how to) try something new. And I don’t know if I believe the doom-and-gloom economic forecasts, but I do believe that the market will become more challenging in 2008 than it was in 2007.

So the question is: are you going to keep doing what made you successful last year, and let someone else find a new way to beat you? or are you going to experiment with new ideas and find the new way to beat them?

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October 10, 2008

Posted on January 1, 2008
Categories: conversation, creativity, Leadership, Management, Marketing | Start the Conversation

It’s a new year, and that probably means that you’ve made a bunch of resolutions and now you’re thinking about how you’re going to make all of those resolutions happen. There’s no shortage of resolutions to be made, and I’ve made more than a few of my own (breaking a long tradition of refusing to focus on the new year as a useful time to incite change).

But over the past year, I’ve begun to see something of a disconnect between the resolutions we’ve made in our work as marketers and the challenges we face as marketers.

In my conversations with marketing leaders, mostly in the business-to-business world, I’ve heard lists of resolutions that include: getting better at measuring campaign results, using the latest technology to run campaigns or to reach prospects, doing a better job of generating quality leads for the sales team, building award-winning branding and advertising, quantifying the results of our new-media efforts, and creating a “green” effort for our brand. There are many more, but the ones that fell into these categories were the most popular.

But then I look at the same conversations and I read the marketing press (and lots of other well-respected blogs that are too numerous to link here) and I conclude that marketing leaders, executives in particular are facing some key challenges: short marketing executive tenure (particularly CMOs), marketing needs more of a seat at the leadership/strategy table, the value of marketing is not well-recognized or accepted (with some even calling for the elimination of the marketing executive role completely).

Does better measurement mean that the value of marketing can be demonstrated better. Well, yes and no. I’d argue that it can demonstrate the value of marketing programs and campaigns. But does measuring lead quantity, lead quality, relationship value, conversational metrics, and all the other traditional and new media metrics we put in place show how the CMO contributes to the overall strategy of the organization?

I’ve seen only one measurement in an organization that demonstrates that anyone (or everyone) is making a valuable contribution: revenue. But I am left asking this question: does measuring the revenue result of marketing programs place a value on the CMO’s contribution?

I don’t know the answer to that question. Yet. But I look at another key executive, the CFO as a point of comparison. Why? Like the CMO, the CFO has measurement responsibility, fiduciary responsibility (for financial position as opposed to brand and market position), and no direct responsibility for revenue creation. What can we learn from the fact that the CFO has such a strong strategic role in nearly every company?

And here’s where we get back to that new year’s resolution thing. My one resolution for this year, as it relates to improving my effectiveness as a marketing leader, is to be able to make new year’s resolutions next year that are consistent with the challenges I face and help me move my effectiveness and my contribution to my company forward.

This means I have to understand the key question I’ve raised here: What underlies the apparent disconnect between marketing leadership and the expectations of corporate leadership? It seems that whatever this disconnect is, is the underlying cause of short CMO tenure, perceived lack of a strategic role “at the table” for marketing, and so many of the other issues I’ve seen raised in the past year (or two, or three, or ten).

And as with so much of what we learn, this will be a conversation. I know I’ll be having this conversation with many people in this field, and I’ll issue my usual and truly sincere invitation to you to participate. I still believe the larger the crowd the better the wisdom.

And as with any resolution, if I want to accomplish it this year, I have to be well on my way by the time we’re three-quarters of the way through the year. So I’ve picked a date that’s meaningful to me (no, it’s not my birthday) by which I hope to have moved much closer to some conclusions and answers.

Care to engage in the conversation?

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Reading Your Spirograph

Posted on July 8, 2007
Categories: Brand, Community | Start the Conversation

I’ve been reading a lot over the past few weeks on the explosion of social networks. It’s hard to read marketing blogs and not read about Twitter or Facebook, and how they relate to Pownce and LinkedIn and all the other options. Oddly, I don’t find myself at all confused. I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter and Pownce (and more). There’s crossover among the people, but from my perspective I know intuitively what (and who) goes on Facebook and what (and who) goes on LinkedIn.

Why? I have circles – more than one. People who find me to be a worthwhile business contact gather around me in that context and form my community of business associates. People who find me interesting as a friend gather around me and form my social community (as is social life). Some people are in both. There are more circles than that, some very closely related, some not, some entirely within others (my friends from school is a subset of all my friends). If I tried to draw it, it might look something like an unbalanced spirograph.

Marketing perspective 1: Your market looks just like this. Your customers, your prospective customers, people who might one day be customers all create the community which gathers around you (because they find what you are saying and the experience you offer interesting – but that’s a whole conversation in itself – look for more posts soon). But they have different reasons. Some like the lifestyle implications of being your customer, some like the way you care for them (I hope), and there are so many more. Knowing what these are, and what they can become means you can understand the kinds of experiences you must offer to engage the various communities.

Marketing perspective 2: In each of these circles – the communities in which you survive as a producer of experiences (note: not “business,” not “goods and services”) some of the community members are very close to you (maybe your most loyal customers) and some are on the edge, maybe moving in and out of your community as it suits them. Knowing who is where and why is critical to knowing your market, and being able to engage them in conversation and deliver a relevant engaging experience.

Reading the unbalanced spirograph that is your community, knowing its shape, knowing its distribution means being able to serve it well.

Knowing how it might change means being able to change with it.

Being able to create new circles (where neither you nor your competitors are delivering relevant experiences today) means being able to create disruption.

What does your spirograph look like?

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