Posts Tagged ‘experience’

We talk to people all day long about marketing. Sometimes these conversations start off a little confusing or disconnected — like we’re talking about completely different things.

So I looked it up. Wikipedia defines marketing as “the process of selling or promoting products to customers to further enhance sales.” No, that’s sales promotion.

If you take away just one thing from this site, let it be this definition: “Marketing is the deliberate and systematic attempt to own a market.” Boom. That’s it. Now we can have a productive conversation.

Well, almost. We’ve put a few more important definitions together in our
How To Go To Market primer.

Lately I’ve noticed an overabundance of smiling, sincere, over-the-top customer service. At the bank, big box stores, utilities, government offices — organizations are starting to re-learn that a huge part of their customer experience depends on the social skills of service reps.

It’s all well and good, and I applaud their efforts, but these companies might do well to remember that transformative experiences don’t happen in a vacuum of affable customer support; Killer brands happen when people’s actions intersect in equal balance with well-honed systems, brand and products.

Consider this:

Last winter I signed up with AT&T U-verse. As an incentive to join, they offered a hefty rebate, in the form of a gift card. It’s been over seven months now, and I still haven’t received the full rebate.

• Despite numerous calls to customer service reps who are very polite and sincerely express their desire to fix my problem
• Despite an average call time of over fifteen minutes, much of it spent on hold while the service rep deals with the rebate center on my behalf
• Despite, every time, assurances that the issue’s been resolved and my card will arrive in four to six weeks
• Despite being informed AT&T might send me a follow-up survey to rate my experience (though I’ve been specifically told its purpose is to gauge how well the rep handled my call, NOT whether my issue was resolved)

It’s painfully obvious that AT&T’s rebate system isn’t giving its reps the proper access, power or authority to get this job done. And so, regardless of its intentions, AT&T appears more interested in displaying a “we’re-here-for-you” service rep ethic than actually delivering the service.

By contrast…

There’s a story about a Nordstrom shopper who, while visiting from out-of-town, realizes he’s about to be late for his plane. Recognizing the negative impact this might have on the customer’s experience, the Nordstrom sales rep personally drives him to the airport, saving the day and enhancing the customer relationship.

While this might seem over the top, it actually makes perfect business sense; the rep trades a couple hours of his time for the value of a life-time Nordstrom customer. And it’s only possible because Nordstrom’s systems actually enable the sales rep to take this action on behalf of its brand.

I’m not saying a near-commodity like AT&T has to live up to this extreme level of service. I’ll just be glad when its systems finally catch up to its customer service intentions.

PS – Feel free to tweet and retweet this post to your heart’s content. If I ever do get resolution, maybe I’ll share the rebate with you…or maybe I’ll just send you a survey to rate your experience.

Assuming this is truly the end of the recession, we can all look forward to a spate of product innovations unlike any since World War II. These products will solve previously unknown problems in brilliant new ways and make their manufacturers millions. If you’re in the business of designing, making or delivering products, the anticipation can be thrilling . . . or daunting.

After all, how exactly do you innovate? Tons have been written on the subject, and yet innovation still comes off as requiring either genius or black magic. If your company lacks a systematic framework for doing innovation, it’s not prepared for this new global economy.

Here’s ours. It’s not really magic: it just works that way.

Click for PDF

Buyers are complex, goal-driven analyzers and organizers of the world around them who are uncompromising when assessing their own experience. Our machine lets you design or adjust that experience by turning a few metaphoric dials.

Here’s how it works. People buy products to achieve outcomes. But rarely can they achieve those outcomes with a product alone. Products often need other products or services to form more complete systems, which in turn may need some kind of infrastructure (e.g., electricity, a road, etc.) to make the product go. Even then the user may need other requisites to use the product — anything from additional people to specialized skills. And of course, not all users are the same. They may use the product in very different contexts — for different purposes, in different environments, in different time frames.

When people evaluate a product, they weigh the outcomes achieved against the requisites required. Whether you’re a product manager, CEO, engineer or whatever, your job as an innovator is to maximize the outcomes while minimizing the required requisites. You do this by modifying the product, the system or the context in which it’s used.

Let’s take an easy one, Coca-Cola. Coke didn’t come in bottles until someone imagined users consuming it in a context other than the soda shop. That idea led to eliminating the requisites of a soda fountain (infrastructure) and the skills to use it — dramatically changing the outcome-requisite equation. Questioning the system comprising grocery stores led to vending machines. Rethinking the purpose led to Diet Coke.

Innovation can be hard to come by if you try to ideate too much at once. Instead focus on very discrete aspects of the user experience as defined in our innovation machine. It works, like magic.

It’s an old story…

Guy goes into the hardware store looking for a drill bit. Every marketer in the world will tell you: this guy doesn’t have a drill bit problem, he’s got a hole problem, just like we all learned in Marketing 101 — you don’t sell features (drill bits), you sell benefits (holes).

Only thing is, that’s not the whole story.

Focus solely on features and benefits and you might be blindsided into offering products that, for all their “superiority,” don’t add up to a superior brand experience. For that, you need to understand context:

• Who are the users of your products?
• What purposes do they use them for?
• What are the systems your products are used within?
• Do you own these systems as well?

By understanding context, you can provide a balance of features and benefits that add up to brand success. How do you get there? It takes a methodology that pulls together the elements of context, systems, products, requisites and desired outcomes to create a blueprint for user experiences that push your product way up the x axis of Brand Significance.

The iPod is a great example.

Apple didn’t simply provide a cool music player (features). And it went well beyond providing an anywhere/anytime personal music system (benefits).

Apple understood how people experience music in the context of their daily lives, and provided an entire system that delivers the experience in three, seamlessly integrated products whose features are perfectly suited to their unique needs: listening (the iPod), organizing (iTunes) and acquiring (the iTunes store).

The result is unparalleled brand experience that enriches people’s lives — and Apple’s pocket book.

It’s easier than ever to satiate our needs and wants. There are more products in more focused categories delivering higher quality for less cost than ever. We’re less willing to offer our allegiance to any product when a better one is likely in the offing.

Product or category leadership is an increasingly specious objective. Simply deliver a superior product, and you’ll be rewarded with an onslaught of competitors and the pressure to make your product both cheaper and better — a battle for market share where margins are the casualty.

Those who do become leaders are increasingly hard to categorize. Apple Inc. dropped the word “Computer” from its name in January 2009. Rather than pursuing leadership through product excellence within the commoditized computer category, it pursued a strategy of bringing enrichment to people’s lives through creativity, music and self-expression.

Similarly, after Harley Davidson successfully petitioned the International Trade Commission for a 5-year tariff to protect its outdated motorcycles against low-cost Japanese imports, it did very little to make its products technically competitive. Instead it took the opportunity to make cartilage-compressing vibration and oil leaks an identifying part of the brand experience, and gave a market of Reagan-era white collar professionals something more — a culture they could proudly belong to — one that artfully melded Reagan’s 50s-era patriotism with an outlaw rebel persona.

We call the kind of loyalty enjoyed by Apple and Harley Davidson “brand significance.” Brand significance is not the result of branding. It is achieved by a combination of two, uniquely integrated accomplishments:

1. inventing a culture that brings meaning to people’s lives; and
2. providing a personally enriching experience that reinforces the culture.

The relationship between meaning, enrichment and significance can be illustrated as follows.

The company’s goal is to push its coordinates up and to the right by finding ways to make the brand more culturally meaningful (y axis) and personally enriching (x axis), resulting in the highest possible brand significance score.

The mechanisms for doing this work will be explored in other posts. First it’s important to see that significant brands go far beyond serving the needs of individuals and their current cultures. Equally important: brands should pursue this by design, not hope to get there by magic.