Search Results: being seen
A Simple Truth About Business Growth
We’ve all seen what happens when a business is poorly scaled. The cult restaurant adds more tables and loses its magic. The software is ruined when too many features are added. The bespoke tourist attraction becomes tacky.
Growth doesn’t come from looking for more opportunities to expand, it’s a result of finding better ways to serve. This doesn’t mean thinking small and staying small. It means being more thoughtful about the need to go bigger, instead of going big for the sake of being big.
Image by Roberto Trobretta.
Surviving Peak Utility
filed in Strategy
When I was a child our family doctor operated a first come, first served, clinic without an appointment system. Some patients arrived three hours before the clinic was due to start to make sure they’d be seen first and a two-hour wait to see the doctor was not uncommon.
“Evening folks.” Dr. Mac said, as he walked through the waiting room to his office, where he would smoke a quick cigarette before seeing the first patient. True story! In those days the family doctor was akin to a god and people accepted the wait and inconvenience without complaint.
Dr. Mac lived and worked in a world with fewer doctors and no prescribing pharmacists, nurse practitioners or alternative medicine, so his services (no matter how average) were highly valued.
Today, in the Western world where patients have endless treatment choices and are better informed about their health, things look very different for family doctors. Patients are no longer happy to wait an hour for a brief consultation with the doctor when they can get more convenient access and treatment, or a much better experience elsewhere. What was once viewed as an invaluable professional service is now almost seen as a standard utility. The reality is that people don’t just want to the doctor to make them better. They want to feel better. And they are choosing alternatives (sometimes more expensive ones) that deliver that feeling.
The same story is playing out across every industry from transport to travel, health to hospitality. Monopolies are being eroded as alternative services that provide better experiences and give people what they want, when and how they want it are thriving.
Dr. Mac would not survive today, not because minor illnesses or their treatment have changed all that much in forty years, but because people’s expectations about what’s worth seeking out, waiting and paying for have changed beyond all recognition. We have reached ‘peak utility’—we are living at a time when average products and standard services are becoming less valuable by the day. Our customer’s and user’s expectations have shifted and if we want our businesses to survive and thrive we have no alternative but to move with them.
Image by Jason Parks.
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.
————
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.
————–
What’s the one thing your audience needs to hear? Go tell them.
Image by Salvaje.
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 New Rules Of Winning
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Just three months ago Volkswagen surpassed Toyota to become the world’s largest automaker.
It’s clear that selling more cars in order to beat that competition had been the company’s goal for some time. As we’ve seen in the past week biggest doesn’t necessarily mean best.
When we use shallow metrics to judge our performance we often fail to take account of things that are harder to measure, and yet are equally (if not more) important to building a sustainable business. When we get stuck in comparison we think about making incremental improvements, tweaking what’s been done before, instead of reimagining what’s possible.
Time and again in business we’ve seen that winners don’t compete—they reframe the problem, reinvent, create and conquer new challenges and run their own purposeful race.
Winning isn’t about being the biggest or beating the competition at all costs—it’s about intentionally changing tiny edges of the world for the better.
Image by Dark Dwarf.
The Power Of The Minimum Viable Experience
I like my insurance company, or should I say I like the people who work for my insurance company. I’ve been with them almost ten years and have no intention of switching. Their call centre team is well trained and they really go out of their way to be helpful and make the customer feel understood. This company’s people are definitely their greatest asset. The process of getting through to the people who do all the heavy lifting in the claims department is another matter.
It’s not easy to sit for 31 minutes listening to a recording that repeatedly tells you one thing while your current reality demonstrates otherwise. I finally gave up listening to how valuable my time was and then out of curiosity called back to see how long it would take to get to a salesperson, by following the phone prompts to the new policy sales department. The answer was 70 seconds from start to finish. Two rings from the final automated prompt and a cheery salesperson picked up.
On the day that I called there were 113 people in the claims queue, which equates to a 40 minute wait. The guy in sales told me that he thought there had been a recent natural disaster in another state—hence the high call volume. He had never seen that many people in the claims queue.
Of course my first instinct was to ask why they don’t just add more people to the claims line. We all know that even with excellent data and planning it’s not always possible to redirect resources at short notice. Sometimes you can’t deliver the service that meets a customer’s expectations. If you can’t do that the next best thing is to manage her expectations. Often the best solution doesn’t mean fixing the actual problem.
What’s worse than a 40 minute wait—is a 40 minute wait without information. What we detest more than the wait is the feeling of uncertainty. There was an opportunity to change the story I was replaying in my head while I was on hold and to create the minimum viable experience (MVE) by simply tweaking the recording.
In customer service the minimum viable experience (MVE) is the experience with the highest return on customer satisfaction versus resources.
There is always an opportunity to create value at the point before the product or service is delivered. Uber has built a business valued at $40 billion by doing just that. They recognised the pain of that uncertainty and took it away, thus creating intangible value and massive emotional benefits for their customers.
When a customer orders a taxi to take her to the airport she wants to get to the airport, but the service starts before the actual journey, with a step that creates certainty in the moment—knowing that she will arrive on time is priceless.
When an Apple evangelist goes to the Genius Bar with a problem he wants his device back up and running, but the step before that is believing that the ‘Genius’ can and will help him. The Genius is trained to deliver a minimum viable experience by telling the customer exactly what he’s doing every step of the way. The phrase “don’t worry I’m here to help, we’re going to sort this problem out for you,” works like magic and best of all it costs nothing.
When we think about delivering the optimum customer experience we strive to create a scenario that meets the customer’s wants, often forgetting that what the customer wants is more than a cab that takes her from A to B, a computer that works, or a human being that picks up the phone right away. There are so many opportunities to create intangible value and subtle expectations that we can fulfil by being more empathetic and without spending a cent.
There is always a way to leave the customer feeling better. It’s up to us to find it.
Image by JF Gornet.
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.
Relevance Is The New Remarkable
I will never see the taxi driver who picked me up from JFK again. He doesn’t have to worry that he tried to overcharge me and he doesn’t care if it’s me, or one of a hundred other visitors in the back seat tomorrow. Uber, on the other hand, knows when I last booked a car with them. They know who drove me, exactly how long it took, where he dropped me off and most importantly how I felt when I left the car. Uber remembers more about where I was, when than I do myself.
When I return to the same hotel reception for the third time in 18 months, they ask me again if this is my first stay with them. How is it possible in 2014 that the receptionist doesn’t know? She tells me not to forget the ‘wine hour’ with a knowing smile. Free wine for an hour every night before dinner is obviously the highlight of many a trip. So why am I expecting her to know that I don’t drink wine and to understand that her comment is completely irrelevant to me? My Airbnb host meets my oldest son so that she can give him the keys we need to her apartment when we arrive in Sydney. They have a cup of tea together, and she finds out that we are into good coffee and might use the local gym, so she plots the great coffee places on a map, stocks up on Nespresso pods and her gym membership card is there for us when we arrive, just in case we feel like using it.
I can roam the floors of Barnes & Noble for hours on end, and no assistant will make a recommendation to me because they have no clue what I might be interested in. Amazon’s whole business is built on understanding exactly what I want and giving me as many shortcuts to that as possible.
When I was growing up, our local butcher knew which cuts of meat my mother would buy on any given day. He knew when we had visitors from England and when money was tight because of how my mother’s shopping habits changed. He took that kind of information in so that he could use it to serve her better and he did that for every one of his customers. Ironically progress, growth and innovation led us not to expect that same level of personalised service for a couple of decades. Now technology is helping to take us back, but it’s the humanity that drives the entrepreneurs and business owners who build the technology that enables meaningful experiences and not their platforms and functionality that is driving this new wave of relevance.
Technology is not just taking us forward—it’s taking us back. It’s giving us back the ability to better understand our customers so that we can be not only useful, but also meaningful to the people we serve. Upstarts like Uber and Airbnb are stealing a march on their competitors not because they have information about us, but because of how they intentionally build organisations that use that information to create better experiences—ones that make us feel good and give us a story to tell.
What we crave more than the commodity we think we are paying for is to be understood. What we want more than being driven to our destination, a comfortable bed for the night, or even a book we can get our teeth into, is to really be seen. What people want more than responsive organisations is personal relevance. The value isn’t just in the data we collect. It’s how we use it to make people’s lives better that counts.
And the flip side is you don’t always need an app for that.
Image by ChrisJL.
What Don’t You Do?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
You are challenged at least ten times every day to explain to people what you do and why you do it. This happens on your about page, at networking events and even as you sit next to someone ten thousand feet up on a transatlantic flight.
A great place to start is by unapologetically telling people what you don’t do.
“We’re not cheap….”
“You won’t find that here….”
“Our best work takes time….”
One of the best examples I’ve seen of this comes from The Mill Gym here is Perth which only admits a hundred members.
“The Mill is a basic facility with all the tools we need. It is purposely designed this way for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is to sort out the pretenders from the realists. There is no time to look at yourself in the mirror, because we have no mirrors. There is no time to stop and watch TV, because we have no TVs. Nor will you find any other distractions here.”
Being really clear about what you don’t do enables you to tell potential customers what you excel at and why. But most important of all, it helps you to attract the right customers to your business and to softly close the door on people who are not a great fit for you.
Now you have more time and space to really connect with the people you want to serve.
The same rule applies whether you’re training a tiny group of hardcore athletes or building a
global yoga community.
So tell me, what don’t you do?
Image by Wally Gobetz.
You Don’t Need A Marketing Plan
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every business has a plan.
Even if it’s written on the back of a Post-it note.
The plan talks about the idea. Who it’s for. How to bring it to market, at what cost and how to get the word out. That final piece of the puzzle is your marketing plan, and yes it’s usually tacked on at the end….when you’re done.
Marketing is seen as an activity. Something that lives on a to-do list. A marketing plan is a bunch of actions and tactics designed to get attention for products and services.
Attention guaranteed a decent level of conversion in the days of linear media and the TV Industrial Complex, but in a Googlized world attention doesn’t automatically scale.
What matters now is being believed not just noticed and a marketing plan that comes into play when you’re done building whatever you’re building isn’t going to get you there.
What every business needs now is story strategy.
You don’t need a plan to broadcast, you need a way to change how people feel in the presence of your brand. Don’t start by asking how can we get noticed. Build something worth noticing. There’s a subtle difference.
Image by Adam Fagen.
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