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Articles filed in: Marketing
The Responsive Vs. Reactive Business Conundrum
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every sustainable business was built in response to an unmet need. These responsive businesses endure because they evolve with the customer they intended to serve. The likes of fidget spinner manufacturers don’t count. You can rattle off a dozen responsive companies that have launched in the past two decades, particularly in the digital space. Brands like Airbnb, Alibaba, Amazon, Uber, Warby Parker and Zendesk have thrived because they solved real problems and built products and services people wanted and came to love.
As startups and disruptors, responsive businesses begin on a level playing field strategically, what happens next depends on the path they take to achieve growth and scale. The companies that lose ground following some success are the ones that become reactive to the marketplace. Now, instead of staying true to their original intention to meet the needs of a customer with a particular worldview, the focus shifts to the competition. And bit-by-bit their priorities change and the strategy subtly shifts. Their ethos gets watered down. They start thinking, then behaving like their competitors, and they lose the edge that made them authentic, exciting and innovative—those qualities that attracted customers to them in the first place.
The business failures we witness at both local and global levels from Billabong to Kodak, are a result of a responsive business becoming reactive. Ironically the growth and scale we seek (no matter what size of company we run), happens when we remain true to our intention to do work we’re proud of in the service of people whose needs and desires are not being fulfilled. We’re witnessing a shift where incumbents like the big banks and chain stores also realise whoever gets (and stays) closest to their customer wins. Now more than ever, remembering and acting on that has got to be the number one priority for every business.
Image by Alan Levine
Design Your Business For The Outcome You Want
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Think about a delighted customer and the ten people she will interact with today.
What’s the story you want that customer to share with someone about you, your product or service?
How do you want them to describe the change you enabled?
What words do you want them to use?
How do you want them to feel?
Now think about all of the things you spent your time on today.
Are the things you’re working on helping you to get to the place you described above?
What needs to change for you to get to where you want to go?
Image by Andrey
A Simple Way To Think About The Value You Create
When it comes to communicating our value, we begin by describing the features and benefits of what we make, serve or sell. That’s why we often end up with a laundry list of claims that our competitors could make.
There is an alternative. Flip this thinking on its head and reflect on what would happen if your product or service didn’t exist. What would the customer’s world look like without you and your particular way of working or serving?
Try telling that story.
Image by Daniel Lee
The Exponential Value Of Being More Human
Everyone was surprised to hear the longer than usual customer service announcement as we were preparing to land in Los Angeles. Many people on board were catching connecting flights to different cities in Australia, and there’s always a little anxiety amongst passengers who are trying to make those connections. The typical announcement informs passengers to check the departures board or see the ground crew on arrival at the gate. This one was different.
The Qantas Customer Service Manager directed us to turn left at the top of the airbridge. He let us know that the aircraft for our connecting flights were in bays close by and told us exactly how far we’d have to walk. He gave us gate numbers and approximate time from our landing to the next flights departing.
The effect of his thoughtful service was magic. Passengers relaxed, their anxiety immediately dissipated. The atmosphere on board was happy and calm. Now instead of having to repeat the same message to different passengers twenty times over, the crew was free to prepare for landing. All because people were seen and understood and their unmet needs were anticipated and fulfilled.
We spent an estimated $600 billion on marketing and advertising in 2017. An Airbus A380 costs half a billion dollars. The cost of this announcement to Qantas is zero. The return on a five-minute investment in happy passengers who remain loyal to the airline is exponential.
Not all marketing investment has a price tag. There’s a lot we can do to help our businesses to be more successful that costs nothing but the willingness to be more human.
Image by Bernard Oh
The Two Questions At The Heart Of Great Marketing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The kind of marketing we practice is a result of what we’re most curious to know about our customers. Many marketing campaigns are created by asking the following questions:
A. What will they buy?
B. How can we get them to buy?
The resulting tactics become about near-term targets, buying more attention and competing on price. The brands that succeed in telling stories that resonate start by asking different questions:
A. Why do they buy?
B. How do they buy?
Successful brands like IKEA and ZARA started with the right questions. Their marketing strategy centres around long-term goals, creating loyalty and building brand equity. They care enough to do the hard work of anticipating the customer’s needs and fulfilling her sometimes unspoken desires.
We get to decide what questions are worth asking.
Image by Marcus Linder
A Tale Of Two Managers
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
My local bank manager, at the branch five minutes walk from my home, works hard to help customers navigate the bank’s new automated systems and services. He’s on hand to show everyone depositing cash how to bypass a teller and make a deposit using the machine in the foyer.
The bank manager at the branch where I choose to bank (three suburbs and a thirty-minute tram ride away), works hard to get to know his customers. He chooses to man the customer service desk so that he can hear his customer’s stories. He knows his customers by name and prioritises understanding their goals before serving them. He prides himself on making sure they are paying less interest and incurring fewer fees.
Both managers care, but there’s a subtle distinction in how they choose to serve. The second bank manager wins because he cares less about finding customers for his products and more about finding the right products for his customers. And he goes home knowing that he’s done work he’s proud to have done.
Image by Spixey
The Power Of Scarcity
Demand for anything is always greater when supply is limited. People want what they can’t have, and so scarcity creates value. Scarcity is not just about managing the availability of resources and limiting supply—it can be the foundation of a successful business model.
When Howard Schultz expanded Starbucks, he knew that it was the feeling of community and connection, not just a decent coffee that was scarce. Boutique hotels changed the definition of luxury by understanding that people craved delight, not only a comfortable bed and fresh towels.
As the world around us evolves what’s in short supply changes too. When everything is automated, personal service becomes more valuable. When commodities are plentiful, artisans flourish. When we can buy the factory-made on every street corner, we covet the thing that’s made by hand.
Every successful organisation and entrepreneur thrives not by knowing what’s selling—but by understanding what people want more of and don’t yet have.
Image by Thomas H
Understanding The Arc Of Your Customer’s Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The plot of every story begins with an inciting incident—the revelation of a problem the hero must overcome. Harry Potter’s offer of a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Cinderella’s invitation to the ball. Buzz Lightyear’s arrival on Andy’s birthday. Everything we know about the hero’s circumstances up until that moment is the backstory. The inciting incident compels the hero to act until the problem is resolved.
As entrepreneurs and organisations with products and services to sell we spend a lot of time collecting data and insights about customer demographics—their backstory. But it’s equally, if not more important to understand the inciting incidents of their story—the events or circumstances that drive your customers to act. What has sent them off on a quest to solve their problem? And what’s your role in helping them to resolve it?
Sometimes marketers use this powerful information simply to sell more of their product to people who don’t need it. Only today, I saw a picture of a giant chocolate bar on a billboard right outside the gym. The caption asked passers-by if they were ‘craving something’. Traditional chocolate manufacturers know the problem we’re trying to solve every January. The last thing they want is for those New Year’s resolutions to stick.
Our job is never to exploit the customer’s circumstances. It’s to help improve them where we can. No matter what we’re selling, we can’t serve the people we want to engage with or create change for the better unless we know what kind of quest those people are on.
Image by David Werner
The Key To The Perfect Story
filed in Marketing, News, Storytelling, Strategy
In a world where information and ideas can be shared in likes, swipes and clicks, we have never had a better opportunity to make our stories more visible. With so much for people to pay attention to, we have also never stood a better chance of being ignored. And that paradox sets us off on a quest to craft the perfect story—the one that resonates with the most people.
All stories have a beginning a middle and end. There is an inciting incident, conflict and resolution, a hero and a guide, failure and success. But unlike on the screens of Hollywood or in the pages of bestselling fiction, there is no ideal structure for crafting the perfect brand story because there is no single algorithm for touching the human heart.
The important thing isn’t the mechanics of the narrative or brilliance of the creative—the intention behind them is key to resonating with the people we hope to serve. Our quest to tell the right story stops us telling the real story. The key is to start with the truth about why we believed in what we do enough to begin and why we care about solving this unmet need for that particular person. It turns out that getting to the heart of the truth works better than finding an angle.
Image by Luigi Tiriticco
How Are You Putting The Customer At The Centre?
At every strategy meeting, in every company boardroom and entrepreneurial hub around the globe, you will hear some version of the requirement to ‘put the customer at the centre’ in everything we do. These words are easy to preach from on high and harder (but not impossible), to implement at a grassroots level. The key to the success of any strategy is getting the people closest to the customer to feel they have ownership of what’s been planned. We can only put the customer at the centre when we create a culture where everyone feels their voice is heard and their work matters.
The bigger questions for all of us are:
1. How can we embed listening to the customer into our culture?
2. How can we empower everyone in the organisation to care and be curious about the customer?
3. How can we make our teams feel like their ideas and input matter?
Successful strategies might be dreamt up in corner offices, but they are implemented in ordinary moments from cubicles, counters and checkouts.
Image by Jim Coyle