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All Of The People, All Of The Time
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
All around us big vanilla businesses and corporations are struggling to understand how to connect with customers and give people what they want. Businesses like McDonalds are ‘resetting’ and trying to find new ways to improve speed and affordability of their core offerings. Their strategy is to become even faster and cheaper. Meanwhile Mexican food chain Chipotle’s revenue jumped by 24%, it turns out that some people (not everyone, but enough to matter), are willing to pay more for sustainable food that’s produced with integrity.
Just thirty years ago operating in a niche was risky—far better to make a product or design a service that appealed to most people. But the problem with the strategy of making something for all of the people is that you end up not being able to really matter to any of them. If you don’t become part of your customer’s story then you are just another replaceable, transactional brand.
Today niche businesses thrive by making values their compass, knowing the customers they want to be loved by and adopting a strategy of enough.
And they understand that you don’t need to matter to everyone to succeed.
Image by Bon Adrien.
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Freedom Is Something You Make
filed in Strategy
When I was growing up (and maybe when you were too), there were two ways you could earn a living. You could have a job, or have a business. Two clear choices, work for a boss, or be the boss. Career guidance advice went something like this…
“Get good grades, to get a qualification, to get a job that enables you to ‘have a life’.”
The subtext was that whoever had the most security from Monday to Friday was the winner. While our teachers had good intentions they never once encouraged us to explore what our definition of ‘having a life’ was. Thirty years on I’m not even sure if asking us to think about work and life in that way would have been going far enough.
The truth is that you don’t have a career, or a business, or a life. You make it. You choose to be the kind of employee or boss that you want to be. You decide what sort of company you want to build, how you want to lead and what legacy you want to leave. And then you create it—actively and intentionally.
You bring it about. You make it happen.
You don’t wait for someone to give you permission to have it.
[Thanks James for inspiring the headline.]
Image by Christian Mayrhofer.
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Intention Is A Competitive Advantage
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Having a competitive advantage is not just about being better in ways that can be measured, it’s about understanding your difference and about knowing how that difference will impact the lives of your customers. Great business leaders know what they want to do well and also importantly what they won’t do.
While other banks were competing on interest rates and bank charges Umpqua Bank aspired to become ‘The World’s Greatest Bank’—not the world’s most profitable, or biggest, or most competitive bank, just the greatest bank to the communities they served. And they did it by making a promise with intention that translated into what they call ‘a state of mind’.
Umpqua behaves and operates less like a bank and more like a trusted neighbour (in fact the bank was originally set up by a group of ‘neighbourhood folks’ 60 years ago to help support each others’ financial needs and aspirations). People who work for a bank that says it’s about “understanding customer’s financial needs and at the same time realising that there’s more to life than money”, which becomes not just a place to bank, but a community hub where knitting groups and yoga classes are held, understand their intention. When you answer the phone with “Umpqua, the world’s greatest bank”, (they do) you know what you’re shooting for in every interaction.
The truth is that the brands we love don’t just create products and services, they find ways to have a role in our lives. That truth applies as much to a phone that people fall in love with, or a thermostat that makes them feel both comfortable and smart as it does to a bank.
Image by Rick Obst.
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What Are Your Customer’s Triggers?
We mostly think of buying as an isolated act, something our customers do in the moment. But it’s probably more useful to think of buying as a behaviour. A behaviour is an action or reaction which is triggered and conditioned. We look in the fridge at 8pm and notice that we’re running low on milk, that’s our trigger to jump in the car before the supermarket closes. The light turns green and that’s our trigger to go.
Digital entrepreneurs build products and services with apps, games and platforms for behaviours. Our use of the digital products and platforms we can’t live without is behaviour driven. How long is it before a bored commuter whips out his iPhone while he stands waiting for a bus?
BJ Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, created a simple formula for behaviour change. The Fogg Behaviour Model suggests that three things need to be in place for a behaviour to occur.
TRIGGER—Do this now.
ABILITY—Can do it.
MOTIVATION—Want to do it.
Marketers of physical products have been slower to recognise buying as a behaviour. As marketers we often think of buying as an exchange that customers can be persuaded into with discounts and special offers. Savvy marketers see buying as a behaviour that they have the power to influence with triggers and not just persuasion. Starbucks built a billion dollar business by creating and leveraging triggers for able and motivated customers. Warby Parker changed the buying trigger for people who needed prescription glasses who only bought a new pair once every two years when their prescription ran out. Black Milk Clothing releases limited edition, time limited ranges. Apple’s product launches are triggers of legend.
Triggers lead to actions that can become behaviours. As marketers we spend a lot of time focusing on our customer’s motivation and ability, but as Fogg mentions we need all three things to be in place to create behaviours and it’s those behaviours that build sustainable businesses. Perhaps we need to start thinking more like great user experience designers?
Don’t just focus on the moment your customer pulls out her credit card. Think about how, why and how often she got to that point and how you might influence that in the future.
Image by Amanda Tipton.
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The Marketing Shortcut
The fare on sale at the coffee window of our local cafe changes each morning.
On Monday homemade protein power balls and muesli bars are strategically laid out to fend off the regret of the weekend’s indulgences. On Tuesday it’s fruit filled muffins and by Friday we’re splashing out with a chocolate covered something. All hell breaks loose on Saturday and Sunday when almond croissants, jam filled doughnuts and bacon and egg rolls are piled high to fuel that weekend feeling, post run treats and long coastal walks.
They sell out every single day.
If you care enough to figure out what people are hungry for and why, (it’s usually not another doughnut or more stuff) then you’ll find you do a lot less marketing.
Image by Spektograf.
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The Business Case For Creating Great Customer Experiences
Saren Indah is a tiny fifteen room hotel in Ubud. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd in a market where amazing seven star resorts line up alongside cheaper than cheap backpacker accommodation. How do you differentiate when you are not the biggest, flashest or cheapest? Saren Indah should be lost in the mediocre middle, and yet year upon year this family run hotel is booked out months in advance and tops Trip Advisor rankings by excelling at customer service and giving visitors a story to tell.
The cost of poor customer service in the U.S. alone is $83 billion per year.
70% of our customers leave never to return because they were not made to feel like they mattered. Of course they don’t just vanish into the ether, they go to the competition. So poor service not only damages our bottom line, it also widens the gap between us and our competitors.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to get people to notice us and once we get them through the door we don’t take care of them. In a world with so many choices it’s no longer good enough to show up and open the door. Smart marketers understand that it’s how the door is opened that matters.
Image by Seagers.
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Why This And Not That?
Why do some shoppers choose to pay $3.48 for a 500g bag of Quaker oats when they can buy a kilo of supermarket own brand oats for $3.29, which works out at less than half the price?
Why do we feel better as soon as the doctor, armed with nothing more than a lolly stick asks us to ‘say aah’ and peers into our mouth?
Why is an original artwork by Banksy less valuable when we don’t know it really is a Banksy?
Why are we drinking more bottled water every year?
It turns out that our beliefs can be far more powerful than our thoughts and our customers are far less rational than we think.
Image by Young Sok Yun.
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Become Part Of The Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
I arranged to meet one of my Twitter friends for the first time in the little bar at the front of my hotel. He is a designer from London and as luck would have it we were visiting New York at the same time, (something we discovered through our simultaneous posts of Times Square on Instagram).
We met, we drank, we chatted.
“I’m surprised you’re staying in a hotel.” he said.
“My partner and I have scored a really cool place on Airbnb. It’s got a giant blackboard in the kitchen and it’s big enough to play frisbee indoors.”
How I chose to travel didn’t fit with the story Tom had constructed about me. The kind of people who meet on Twitter, whose work gives them freedom to travel—people with blogs, who discover that their friends are in New York by checking Instagram, don’t stay in hotels. And very, very soon they will never queue for a black taxi in London or a hail yellow cab from the sidewalk in New York, because riding with Uber will be one of the ways they signal that they belong.
We are the stories we tell ourselves and the choices we make from who we follow on Twitter, to how we experience a city, where we shop and what we buy have become as big a part of our identity as the place where we were born.
Buying is no longer about getting things we need. It’s about reinforcing a set of beliefs we hold and share. Marketing is not about finding new ways to sell more of something. It’s about affinity more than it’s about price—feelings more than facts. Marketing is about giving people frames of reference and context. And above all, marketing is about becoming part of peoples’ story.
Image by llamatofu.
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Shifting The Focus From Results To Relationships
There’s a problem with how performance is measured by both ourselves and in our organisations. Typically you have a budget and targets to achieve. The purpose of the budget is to make sales go up, or waiting times go down. Our systems are designed to judge and reward us on results. If the campaign you authorised sold more t-shirts last quarter then that’s a win. But if the only way you can get sales to go up is to spend money on a campaign to make sales go up, then you’re going to have to keep spending money on campaigns to make sales go up.
I’ve seen brand mangers ride the wave of fantastic public awareness campaigns that boosted their results in the short term, only to see sales come crashing back down a couple of months later as the awareness they had engineered evaporated along with their advertising budget. And so the cycle perpetuates. They spend more to get more. While it might keep some businesses and ad agencies afloat for a little while this is not a sustainable strategy. There is no shortcut to mattering to your customers.
It’s a lot harder to justify building little by little for the long term, because we are constantly measuring and measured by short term results. If you apply for a promotion or a new post your employer wants to see the sales figures, she needs metrics as proof that you’ve done your job. And so we work hardest of all to give others (and ourselves) something to measure. We look for quick wins and easy targets which reinforce the notion that we’re doing our job. Sometimes we just end up measuring the wrong things and in doing so we subconsciously demonstrate to the people we should be serving that we’re not in it for the long haul.
When Warby Parker released it’s first fun and quirky annual report it led to their three biggest sales days at the time. Something that was designed to delight customers became an accidental marketing tool.
“It very much fit into our philosophy of being transparent. We find the more information we share, the more vulnerable we are, and that sharing the positive and the warts—the deeper relationship we build with our customers.”
—Neil Blumenthal Co-Founder Warby Parker
What if we optimised our businesses, our organisations and our cultures for relationships first and results second? What is we focused less on creating awareness and more on generating trust. What if we traded quick wins for loyalty? What if we stopped trying to be seen and learned how to see instead?
What might the real gains be then?
Image by Stavos.
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There’s More Than One Way To Tell Your Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In 2004 Chanel paid $33 million for the production of a two minute film which became the most expensive advert ever made. In a post GFC economy that figure seems shocking, but Chanel is one of the most valuable global brands. They have the marketing budget and they’re not afraid to use it.
Dropbox was founded four years after the Chanel advert aired and has grown to a 300 million user base with a $10 billion valuation by using a clever referral and social sharing reward marketing strategy. Instead of paying to talk about their product Dropbox solved a problem and then rewarded happy users with extra storage when they referred friends.
In a world where social capital increasingly drives the results of companies who thoughtfully connect with their customers it’s time to ask ourselves some tough questions about how we go about influencing the people we serve.
Permission marketing and lower barriers to entry mean we have more opportunities than ever to reach people—but just because we can doesn’t mean we should. There’s a difference between having something to say and having either the opportunity or the budget to say it.
Our companies, non-profits and businesses are judged more and more not by what they sell, but by how and why they sell it. What we stand for is as much a differentiator as what we make. It turns out that there is more than one way to tell your story.
Image by Andrew Ferguson.