Jeffrey Rosenberg

A body blow for customer research

The other day a NY Times article quoted Steve Jobs as saying, when asked what market research went into the iPad, "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." Classic Steve Jobs. And it works for him, and it's worked for Apple (although it didn't work so well for Apple when Steve Jobs wasn't CEO). I suspect this quote will embolden those who do not place a mission-critical value on customer research.

I would ask those people one simple question: Do you have people lining up overnight waiting for your next product release? Steve Jobs does. Just about every other company doesn't. You need the input of customers.

I've written about the need - no, requirement - for weaving customer research into the marketing process. It doesn't have to be a massive study. Sometimes all you need is a single day with 6 - 8 customers. Sometimes you need more.

Is a customer going to hand you your next disruptive innovation? No. But they will hand you a window into their psyche such that you and your team can come up with the next disruptive innovation. Make no mistake, all of Steve Jobs' innovations have come from consumer insights. It's just that they came from his own sense of customer needs and behaviors. Us mortal business people need the input of customers.

An example of relevant QR code usage by Home Depot

Came across a great use for QR codes recently. Home Depot (beginning around March/April of this year, from what I can tell) began rolling out QR codes in print ads and at retail. The example at left is from their Garden Center. Using a QR reader from my smartphone I was able to instantly explore just about anything I would need to know about care and maintenance for these flowers. And as you can see by the screenshot from my phone (right), I could also discover other flowers that would make good companions (to the flowers, not to me - that's another app).

This isn't a solution looking for a problem (as can be the case with technology). This is effective use of a tool to bring relevant content to consumers during the shopping experience, in context, to facilitate and accelerate sales.

The mission critical nature of customer centricity

Excellent article in AdAge (via Response Media) about the importance of being customer-centric across the business, not just in the marketing department. By focusing on customers (as opposed to erecting barriers to switching, for example) companies can be better positioned to withstand inevitable disruptions in their industries. The customer-centric orientation should drive operations, sales, marketing, technology. It shouldn't be a downstream layer of activity, but rather woven into the fabric and DNA of the company.

This is not easy for most companies, and those that resist will pay a steep price. Most companies have an intensely internal industry/company perspective. They focus on making and selling products, and on what the competition is doing. They confine themselves to established industry structures. Very few have the kind of laser focus on customers that allow them to break through conventional approaches and stay attuned to emerging customer needs. At a time where innovation and disruption can come from anywhere at any time, being customer centric is mission critical.

Is there a role for users in innovation?

Not according to Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen who wrote a piece for Co.Design entitled "User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea" (Brought to my attention by the good folks at UserInsight, who wrote their own opposing post.)

The article's title says it all. If you passionately subscribe to the school of thought that users are essential to the design and development process it's a must-read (unless you anger easily) because this mode of thinking is quite common. But I think it's absurd and off-base. Here are the authors' four main points, with my corresponding counterpoints:

• Point: Users insights can’t predict future demand. Even the users themselves have no idea if they will like an entirely product before they start using it.
• Counterpoint: It is true that no one - users nor the brand - can predict with accuracy the demand for an innovative offering. So is it better to create the offering in a vacuum and then see what happens? Or is it better to iteratively learn at key development points (or throughout the process) what is working and what isn't? It doesn't mean you take what users say completely at face value. It means that you give them a voice, a seat at the table. It's one of many inputs. The investment in conceptualizing, developing, marketing, distributing and servicing offerings is enormous. Why take the risk of being on the wrong trajectory?

 

• Point: User-centered processes stifles creativity. Creative people will feel limited and bored, not inspired, if they have to start out a creative process with a lot of user knowledge.
• Counterpoint: I have worked with some incredibly inspired, mad scientist ideators and creative innovators. None of them - not a single time - have ever walked into a room and started banging out ideas. They all want to know: Who we are targeting? What are their profiles? What are their motivations? What are their habits? Then from there: Who are their competitors and what are they doing? What are the business goals? Where is the brand going? The answers form the platform for innovation.

 

• Point: User focus makes companies miss out on disruptive innovations. If a company bases their decisions on user studies, they will conclude that most radically new innovations are not rational to pursue. 
• Counterpoint: Correct. If you conduct user research and you do what users say you will probably suffer from incrementalism. But that's not how you use research. You use research to gain insights that you then synthesize with other key inputs, such as competitive intelligence, business strategies, and brand strategies to generate ideas and concepts that are breakthrough, transformative, innovative. (Although if you structure and moderate the research properly you will get some of that from users as well.) User insights should be used as an input, not as the answer.

 

• Point: User-led design leads to sameness. Even if user insights were useful, it isn’t a competitive advantage.
• Counterpoint: Competitive advantage doesn't come from insights that no one else has. It comes from unique products, experiences, services, or distribution models that are partially informed by user insights. Sameness is typically a result of focusing disproportionately on what the competition is doing. It's a brand's unique take on opportunities that leads to differentiation. And user insights can help uncover those opportunities.

Apple and IKEA do leverage insights, just not in a systematic way. Even the Walkman was created from real consumer need. A clear vision driven by a dynamic leader is critical, but that vision comes from a need, a marketplace gap, whitespace. That gap cannot be identified in the absence of user insights.

I have seen what happens when users aren't involved as sources of insight or as collaborators. It's dysfunctional and sub-optimized and always leads to big money being left on the table. Sure, some companies can pull it off. But even they can stumble badly. Remember the 1990's, Apple?

Countering top arguments against the social web

Well, we're 1/12th of the way through 2011 and I still find myself having to passionately (sometimes too passionately) espouse the virtues of the social web. (I try my best not to get defensive, which is a challenge, but that's neither here nor there.)

FWIW, here are four random arguments I hear daily against the social web, along with my counterarguments:

1. Online social networking will destroy old-fashioned in-person contact. I believe the social web expands both depth and breadth of relationships, and I don't think it's a replacement for in-person contact for the vast majority. My perspective is that it's pure enrichment: I know more interesting things about more people that I ever would have without social media. It strengthens the connective tissue among my relationships.
2. Twitter doesn't have staying power. So what? Twitter is merely a property / platform. The behaviors it has created will only solidify. Twitter may pass, but only because something bigger and better has expanded on its foundation. The behaviors it has created are becoming part of what we as people do.
3. "Checking in" is a waste of time. Checking in (via location-sharing mobile applications like Loopt, Gowalla, Facebook Places or Foursquare) means different things to different people. To some it's a way of enabling serendipity (my friend is having lunch near me so I'll go say hello), and to some it's a way of sharing something about themselves (I want to let my friends know I'm at the Statue of Liberty). Did we live just fine before location-sharing became possible? Sure. But now we get to share more things with more people and enable even more in-person interaction.
4. I don't care what my friend is eating for lunch. Some content will always be uninteresting to some people across all media. That said, it takes me less time to read what my friend is eating than it does to read the subject line of a junk email, so really, what's the downside? Plus I think it can a) spark conversation and b) lead you to be exposed to something new.

There will always be battles to fight (I'm still fighting battles with Fortune 500 clients about why they should care about their websites); all we can do as digital champions is keep plugging away and picking off the naysayers one by one. Onward.

Gaming and how it can influence digital strategy

Just watched Jane McGonigal's fascinating TEDTalk on gaming and the links that can be established between solving big problems in virtual worlds and solving big problems in the real world. She cites four "super powers" gamers develop from gameplay, all of which are valuable as we in the digital / marketing / strategy space think about the consumers and end users we serve:

1. Urgent optimism. McGonigal defines this as the "desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success."
2. Social fabric. Gamers weave a tight social fabric. Studies show that we like people better after we've played a game with them. Playing a game with someone requires a lot of trust to play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over, etc.
3. Blissful productivity. When we're playing a game we're happier working hard than sitting around. Gamers are willing to work hard if they're given the right work.
4. Epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring mission.

These "super powers" provide us with another set of attributes by which we can describe and understand the motivations people. They uncover amazing opportunities to layer gaming - not necessarily games - into marketing strategies and initiatives. Gaming isn't a fad, and it's not just about entertainment. Replicating aspects of what makes games inherently attractive can create new sources of significant stickiness and value.

Taking American Airlines promotion to the next level with social media

I came across American Airlines’ “Spot Snap Send Sweepstakes” the other day, a promotion that offers a chance to win 250,000 AAdvantage miles by sending them pictures of their ads in New York City. Putting aside whether or not the mechanics of this promotion makes intuitive sense to the target audience, it stops just short of what I think would be a natural follow-through: a social component.

It’s not that social media is the answer to everything, nor that every campaign has to include social media. But I think a campaign architecture that includes photo sharing and mobile logically begs for a sharing component. Adding social media to the mix (e.g., sharing the photos on, say, AA’s Facebook page) has real incremental business benefits:

• More people would see it. Photos posted on AA’s Facebook page would be seen by two additional audiences: 1) Other AA Facebook fans, and 2) Friends who are also fans of AA (would appear in their News Feeds)
• Would build community. You have to know real results of Facebook fan pages before dismissing the ability to build community on the foundation of a campaign that asks people to take pictures of airline ads. It can happen. Fan postings would generage interest and conversation in a variety of ways, including connecting people and enabling conversation around such things as ad location. And that would occur even if AA did nothing but set up the fan page. Add in some AA-generated conversation (e.g., “where do you think this picture was taken?”), and this page could build deeper engagement with the brand.

My colleague Jennifer Ready pointed out that it is likely that one of the goals that drove the idea behind this promotion’s development was to build AA’s email database. I agree with that observation, and I think you could achieve that goal while gaining the benefits of a social component simultaneously, taking this from a one-to-one to a many-to-many campaign. It would create an even stronger set of business benefits, and would build internal capabilities around social engagement for AA.

Three themes from the Mashable Media Summit

Yesterday I attended the Mashable Media Summit (#mashablesummit) in NY as part of Internet Week New York (#iwny) with @aderricks. While there are detailed accounts of the day elsewhere, I thought I'd simply share three primary themes that I heard across the range of speakers representing a range of businesses (Starbucks, CNN, College Humor, The Onion, The Red Cross, etc.).

1. Each speaker (and their respective companies) seem to be approaching social media in a very deliberate way. They believe in social media's ability to connect with, engage, and monetize consumers. Everyone is - at an almost guerrilla level - piloting, testing, learning, refining. It's very much trial and error, and experimentation.
2. No one knows what the evolution path of social media looks like. No one. As nearly everyone said in one way or another, we are are in day one of a millennial journey.
3. The vast majority of the speakers' contexts for leveraging social media were around customer engagement, not about economic value. There doesn't seem to be much of a burning platform around revenue or cost reduction. Certainly engagement leads to it, but there isn't a direct focus on it.

For an interesting analysis of how the day played out on Twitter, see @KevinLyons analysis (via @missdetructso): http://kevindlyons.com/2010/06/09/anatomy-of-mashables-mashablesummit-hashtag/

Understanding the paradigm shift: Online news

Yesterday CNN.com ran a story citing data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that shows how Americans consume news across all media (print, TV, radio, online). The 51-page report reveals an abundance of trend and usage data that further portends the future of journalism. (On a side note, the CNN.com article incorrectly states that "three-fourths [of Americans] say they hear of news via e-mail or updates on social media sites," when in fact it's three-fourths of the 71% of Americans who get news online, or 53% of Americans.)

Amid all of the data, one paragraph in particular caught my eye:

"To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in emails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads."

In a previous blog post I talk about the importance of internalizing the paradigm shift that is happening online and how that will lead to a more strategic perspective on the online tactics you should pursue, as well as a better understanding of the emerging capabilities that are being continuously introduced. Understanding the paragraph above from the Pew study is just as important as understanding the data - we all know that online news consumption is growing. And don't get me wrong, the data is critically important. But to really get the emotional side of the consumer behavior equation, you have to understand a) the power of shared experiences and b) the power of recommendations from one's social graph.

The social graph is a living, breathing organism that is dramatically affecting online behavior, and understanding it's influence is critical to more effective marketing. There are table stakes tactics for leveraging this phenomenon: Enable sharing, create content worthy of being shared, structure content for easier sharing, create space for conversation and participation, SEO, etc. But internalizing the paradigm shift will allow you to take advantage of the participatory web in innovative ways and drive some separation between you and your competitors.

Two primary reasons the iPad is going to succeed

Since Apple launched its latest new product, the Apple iPad, two days ago, it has received a tremendous amount of negative press. "Just a big iPhone / iPod Touch" seems to be the most common take on the iPad. People are wondering if there is truly a market for a 10" iPhone. And initially I can see why people would wonder.

While I agree the iPad is a big iPhone, I think there are two huge distinctions that will result in the iPad doing very well for Apple.

First, there are hundreds of millions of people in the United States who do not have an iPhone for one reason or another (cost of the device, unwillingness to pay monthly fees, lack of interest in its advanced feature set, etc.). But just about everyone has heard about it or has at least seen the commercials. For some percentage of this population, the iPad will be a way to get in the game without a commitment to a wireless provider. They will have an opportunity to experience everything about the iPhone they have been hearing about, and more.

Second, this device will open up a new way for consumers to experience entertainment and consume Internet content. Think the laptop didn't change the way people use computers? Think the iPhone didn't change the way people use phones? The iPad's portability, access to the Internet, and app platform make it a unique device in the house. And with the growing use of the Internet for TV and movie streaming, Apple is poised to be a major accelerant of that trend by offering a device that will allow for TV and movie streaming where people are used to consuming it - in their living rooms - and anywhere else they care to.

Am I going to buy one? I have no desire right now - I already have an iPhone. But I believe there is a big market for the iPad and that it will drive a whole new set of Internet usage behaviors. (And it will enlarge the already booming Appple ecosystem.) I'm sure I'll buy one someday.