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Articles filed in: Strategy
The Moments In Between
On a recent international flight, a colleague was upgraded from Business Class to First Class.
The four cabin crew had only eight passengers to look after, so they could be extra attentive. The in-flight service was stellar. Everything happened quickly and smoothly, the menu was more varied and the seats more comfortable.
But for all of that by the end of the journey, he concluded that there’s very little to differentiate one experience from the other while you’re in the air. A lot of the value is created before boarding and after landing—during the moments in between. What made flying First Class exceptional was the seamlessness of the experience while on the ground. No queueing at passport control (the immigration officials come to you), beautiful lounges to freshen up in between flights and unhurried transfers.
We devote most of our energy and resources to delivering spec—on the things customers should expect from us, but it’s the moments in between where we have the opportunity to excel, differentiate and delight.
Where are your moments in between? How can you use them to give the customer a story to tell?
Image by simplethrill.
When It Comes To Customer Insights Go Deeper
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Grace is 32 years old, she has worked hard to establish herself on the career ladder and bought her first home. Grace and her partner Mike are trying for a baby. As marketers with a brand story to tell we’re in a hurry to gather as much data as we can about Grace. We want to know her postcode, where she shops and what she chooses. We want to know how much she earns and how many people live in her household. Of course, there are companies, algorithms and applications that can filter this data for us.
But even as we’re paying attention to the data, we may be missing opportunities to serve Grace and tell a story that resonates with her because of what we don’t know.
We don’t know why she can’t wash her hands without glancing in the bathroom mirror, or what makes her wear impossibly high shoes on Friday night—the kind that leave her wearing Band-Aids on the backs of her heels for a week.
We haven’t worked out why she often buys flowers for friends when her own vase is rarely full.
We don’t understand the reason she unscrews the fabric softener bottle in the supermarket aisle to smell the fragrance, or why she wishes her hair was less of what it is and more of what someone else’s seems to be.
We haven’t discerned why she believes raw chocolate is worth paying four times more for, or why she stopped buying magazines but loses herself for an hour on Pinterest every night.
We are not wondering why she needs to be seen to “have it all”, or who she trusts and how they earned it.
How is it that we can know so much and so little all at once?
What don’t you know about your customers? Go deeper.
Image by Sascha Kohlmann.
Why Getting More Hits To Your Website Is Overrated
Every day you delete messages received from faceless SEO companies who have “noticed you could have a lot more hits to your website”. We are often mistakenly led to believe that our biggest challenge is getting more people to pay attention to our products, services or work.
Of course, we can game our way to increasing a meaningless number, while fooling ourselves into thinking we are making progress. The truth is it doesn’t matter if people landed or came, what matters is that they got exactly what they were hoping for, left surprised and delighted and wanted to come back.
The most 100 most popular websites in the world don’t get there by focusing on gaming numbers, they do it by obsessing about how to be useful to the audience they serve.
The challenge for most businesses isn’t to work out how to get more people to notice them. It’s to be clear about which people they want to matter to, to know what those people care about and to understand how they can make a difference in their lives.
Image by Duncan Hull.
7 Steps To Becoming A More Strategic Marketer
As marketers we spend much of our time and energy on tactics. We agonise over the creation of lead magnets, spend countless hours honing sales pages and perfecting social media promotions.
How To Become A More Strategic Marketer
1. Take a long-term view of your business, one that doesn’t require you to go for quick wins.
2. Find a group of people you care about serving.
3. Listen to what they say and watch what they do.
4. Create a product or service you believe in, one that solves problems and satisfies wants and needs.
5. Trust the people you made it for.
6. Stop selling to and start connecting with people, talk about why you made what you made.
7. Rinse and repeat.
There’s nothing more magnetic to your potential customers than the feeling of being seen and understood. That’s the number one job of your marketing.
Image by Don Harder.
The Power Of Customer Context
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There’s a tiny hole-in-the-wall florist in the heart of the city, close to big office buildings and the cafes where people meet for breakfast and lunch. If it were an ordinary florist it would be the kind of place people would walk past on their way to somewhere else.
The neighbouring florist’s made-to-order, elaborate, cellophane-wrapped bouquets don’t cater to commuting office workers who live in small apartments on modest budgets. Meanwhile, the hole-in-the-wall sells out of simple, inexpensive, glass jars filled with wildflowers. The owner understands the power of the context in which the customer experiences his brand and how his product fits into her story.
There’s no need to second-guess the gesture of buying a little bunch that’s perfect for cheering up the corner of a desk on Monday morning (no vase or pre-ordering required), and no excuse not to celebrate the start of the weekend on the way to the tram on Friday night.
The more we put the customer at the centre of our marketing, the more we leave room for their story, the better our results will be. How are you doing that?
Image by mimmyg.
What Do You Want Your Audience To Remember?
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Many people who’ve read my latest book Meaningful: The story of ideas that fly say that the introduction impacted them the most. It would never have been written without a nudge from a trusted friend, who reminded me after he’d read the manuscript that some people might only read one page. We don’t always have the luxury of getting people to pay attention to everything we want them to remember. He told me to write the page people needed to read. This is what I wrote.
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EVERY DAY COUNTS
Our deepest fear is that we will run out of places to hide—that one day there will be no boss who allows us to remain invisible and no political or economic circumstance that stops us from doing the most important work of our lives. We are the ultimate paradox. There are only two things we want—we want to hide and we want to be seen.
I know you’re scared that your idea might not work.
I know you worry about being wrong, far more than you celebrate the things you get right.
I know you waste time being anxious that you won’t measure up to someone else’s metric of success.
I know that some days you say one thing and do another.
Why else would the same New Year’s resolutions happen every new year?
I know you are afraid people will laugh at you.
I know that every day you walk a tightrope between getting over these fears and creating an impact.
I know you’re ‘this close’ to a breakthrough.
I wrestle with these fears, too. Every single day. On my best days, I put away my nervous laughter, the twenty emails I must answer and my to-do list, and I do the things I don’t have the courage to do on the days I want to hide. The things that matter—the kind of things I wish my brother had had a chance to do.
My brother never posted a photo on Facebook or created an iTunes playlist. He didn’t ever book a room on Airbnb or make a call from an iPhone. He never got to know what an app was and how magical the Internet would be. He will never walk across the Brooklyn Bridge or eat a moon pie in Gramercy Park. And he won’t be there to kiss his daughter when she turns eighteen in ten days’ time.
Johnny was the kid who wouldn’t come in from playing outside until the very last warning. He lit up any room just by walking into it. Like the Pied Piper, he had trails of friends who followed him and women who adored him (yes, he was impossibly good-looking, too). He was funny and magnetic and caring and genuine, and he died right on the cusp of a brand-new millennium, with a lot of dreams left inside him because he didn’t understand that there was no reason to wait for tomorrow to be better—that he didn’t need to hide. He was the most magnificent person who had everything he needed, and he didn’t know it.
Every day counts.
The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.
I see you.
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What’s the one thing your audience needs to hear? Go tell them.
Image by Salvaje.
What Can You Build Upon?
filed in Strategy
You have just 20 minutes. What’s the most valuable thing you can do with them?
It probably isn’t checking your LinkedIn updates, responding to housekeeping emails or listening to one more podcast about productivity.
Checking and updating may feel like work but they aren’t things you can build upon.
If you can’t look back at the end of the day and see the foundation you laid or a mark you made, you’re probably not doing the things that will get you to where you want to go.
Image by WorldSkills.
How To Optimise For Customer Delight
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
“You’re here for the Valium?” blurted the dental receptionist as they arrived.
The young man looked blankly at her and then at his mother. He was about to have three wisdom teeth removed under local anaesthetic. He had arrived early to be prepared for the procedure and dutifully took the 20mg of Valium given to calm him without understanding why. The dentist would be with them in an hour. Meanwhile, the receptionist continued through her checklist with the best of intentions, getting documentation signed and giving aftercare advice. The boy’s Dad pointed out three mistakes on the consent form before he signed it. All the while Sesame Street blared away on the television in the background of the otherwise empty waiting room.
Regardless of whether the procedure went well the level of empathy, attention to detail and care could have begun long before the patient sat in the dentist’s chair.
Every day we take our customers on a journey, along that journey there will be ‘moments of truth’—opportunities to either disappoint or delight. We often think of ‘moments of truth’ occurring in times of a customer service crisis and focus a lot of our energy on delighting in those moments, but ‘moments of truth’ happen routinely.
There are certain “givens” that customers expect, and they’re disappointed if they don’t happen. Then there are opportunities to create ‘magic’ which is where we often focus our customer service efforts. It’s natural to want to delight but we sometimes forget that focusing on the “givens” is as important as delivering the magic.
In our rush to delight the customer we can overlook the basics.
Paying attention to the ‘givens’ as much as the magic is how we delight. We must do both.
What are the “givens” in your customer’s journey and where is there an opportunity to create magic?
*Download and the Customer Delight PDF to make lists of opportunities you have to meet expectations and to create magic. Use this list to refine the customer experience and optimise for delight.
Image by Miss Messie.
How To Build Brand Equity
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The toilet paper manufacturer has seemingly found a new way to increase customer engagement and build brand equity. Instead of just embossing patters on the paper, the company has decided to emboss its logo on every sheet. Imagine the meetings, time, energy and a myriad of other resources (including retooling of machines) that went into making and implementing this marketing decision. Now imagine the conversation that started the company on this journey to finding ways to create brand equity. Phrases like ‘captive audience’ (not so much), and ‘increased brand awareness’ were probably used, leading to many of the wrong questions being asked and answered.
Brand equity is not created by sticking a logo where a customer has no choice but to see it. Brand equity evolves when the brand is so meaningful to the customer that it becomes part of her story. It doesn’t happen when she sees the logo, but when she wants to be seen with it. Big difference.
The reason the backpacker at the airport covers every part of her 15 inch Macbook apart from the Apple logo with a heavy duty protective case, is because she wants people to know that she is part of the Apple tribe. Her Macbook is as much a part of her identity as the battered, bright yellow, sticker-covered violin case she rests her foot on while she surfs the Internet in the departure lounge.
We don’t commandeer brand equity with adverts or increased exposure. We earn it when we change how the customer feels about herself in the presence of our brand. And yes, it’s even possible to do that with a toilet paper brand, just not in the way we might have done fifty years ago.
Image by Shandi-lee Cox..
The Customer Referral Source Changes The Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Not all prospective customer enquiries are created equal.
An enquiry via website contact form, made as a result of a Google search is very different from a direct referral from a friend. It’s also worth remembering that the customer’s story at the time she seeks you out changes the sales conversation.
How and when a potential customer finds you has a bearing on the story she is ready to hear and the value you can create for her in the moment. It’s just as important to focus on her circumstances and worldview and to allocate resources to that as it is to hone the brand story you want to tell.
Image by Kejing GU.