Insight and research
Customer Experience or Customer Exposure?
Just recently, Stuart Wilson, Director of Ambient-Sweet at Premier Foods Limited made a great point in a Marketing Society Linkedin disccussion about how we need to make sure that we do not confuse ‘Customer Experience’ with ‘Customer Exposure’.
I do believe that the reason that as marketers we struggle to get to grips with improving customer, dialogue, experience is that we are looking at it from the wrong perspective. We spend too much time focusing on the customer when we should be ‘focusing on what the customer is focusing on’ !
The only way that we can really understand this perspective is by ‘allowing’ customers to tell us what is and isn’t working in their experience - when, where and how they want to tell us!! If we really listen, enter into dialogue, respond quickly and reward their contribution we are - by doing this alone- enhancing their customer experience.
I think that we need to stop thinking about about what we need to do ‘to’ or ‘for’ customers and start thinking about about what we do ‘with’ them, if we are to get the emotional engagement that we seek. This way they will help us to shape the design, delivery and management that will work for them.
Social networking is a good example of this ’sharing’ mindset in practice but not because Facebook and the like are great brands supported by slick marketing. Social networking is the success that it is because it supports an emerging change in behaviour with collaboration at its core.
Perhaps we don’t need to think so much of the resources, time and effort that we need put into keeping customers involved and engaged but more in terms of creating the right physical and emotional environment for them to want to do it for themselves?
Live Insights
True Insight comes from allowing customers to tell us what they want to tell us when they want to tell us and how they want to tell us
Anything else is merely validation
If you ask a customer a question chances are they will respond with an answer (especially if paid to do so!) but this doesn’t tell you:
- · how much the topic/issue really matters to them (if at all)
- · what influence it will have on their buying behaviour (if any)
- · what the words and phrases that you use really mean to them (if anything)
This means that a lot of money spent on collecting customer insight is currently wasted because it is asking about stuff that is not relevant, important and motivating for the customer
This flawed and dated approach is now turning on its head because….
‘Customers are doing it for themselves’
Tired of mass marketing, product development without consultation, retailer supremacy and being asked to take part in tedious and irrelevant surveys customers are taking things into their own hands. They are ‘following’ brands they like, co-creating new products, buying through whatever distribution channel gives them what they want in a cost effective and convenient way and sharing customer reviews.
Problem is with a few notable exceptions, brands have not kept up and Marketers are still banging the old drums!
The way in which customer insight will be accessed in the future will require marketers to do
- · Less talking and more listening
- · Less questioning and more elicitation
- · Less promoting and more responding
- · Less developing and more evolving
This means a change in mindset and learning new skills. Right now, Customers are moving faster than Marketers and the pace is quickening. There’s no question that quick action is needed and those who hesitate will be ‘lost’ still sitting in their Ivory Towers wondering
‘What happened?’
Beyond the Focus Group
Beyond the Focus Group
Imagine telling a 13-year-old that she has to find someone to take her to Borders so she can purchase the just-released album by her favourite boy band. She’d likely roll her eyes and pronounce, “WHATEVER,” as she typed a few things into her laptop and within moments accessed the songs, including cover art, downloaded via the Internet. Or, perhaps you tell a 25-year-old collector of video-game memorabilia that he has to scour weekend flea markets and the like to find old Nintendo game cartridges for his prized collection. He’d shrug you off, do a quick search on an online auction site, and find exactly what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. No driving or in-person searching involved. Examples like this, of course, could go on for pages. Thanks to the power of the Internet, the way we live and work has changed drastically.
Virtually every segment of our personal and business lives has been transformed. Regardless of how you feel about all the changes technology has brought, a few things are certain: The Internet allows for lightning-fast speeds, near-instant gratification, efficiencies once only dreamed of, reduced costs, and super-streamlined processes and activities.
Like most industry segments, qualitative market research and its traditional focus group approach have not gone untouched in this Age of the Internet. Businesses and researchers have taken focus groups to the web in the form of blogs, communities, social forums and message boards. These outlets have streamlined the process of collecting insights and also made it more affordable.
But one has to ask: Are these web-based alternatives to focus groups perfect substitutes for the in-person variety? What happens when you lose the visual aspect of a candid, stream-of-consciousness response, body language and interpersonal connectivity? How much are you missing when you don’t see those eye rolls, shrugs, or even tears?
For purely quantitative research, text-based applications can produce speedy and useful data. For qualitative research, however, they aren’t going to stack up in the long run. The problem? Thoughts and opinions tapped out on a keyboard will never result in the kind of face-to-face, personal exchange researchers desire and hope to get from in-person focus groups - no matter how many emoticons are used. 
The expressions, the emotions, the personal connections, the stream-of-consciousness thoughts - these are all critical for good, worthwhile qualitative research. These candid, face-to-face, truthful experiences are the core of the connections between brands and their consumers, forming the basis of great qualitative research. Unfortunately, today’s online, text-based applications are inadequate for capturing this dynamic.
Video-based online platforms, however, do capture these crucial non-verbal, emotive and candid insights. Moderator questions are sent via video to the participant, who responds with a webcam, simulating a face-to-face meeting. In fact, the platform can be set up so one participant can see and interact with other participants via video exchange. These things can’t happen with only a keyboard and transcripts of conversations.
Qualvu have recognised this and are now the leader on online qualitative video based research
Here are four reasons why video-based online qualitative research using the Qualvu platform takes research to a whole new level. This asynchronous platform is not just an online version of a focus group: It creates unique dynamics for both the researcher and the participant that can result in remarkably deep levels of insight.
Reason 1 : The Convenience Factor
Online video-based qualitative research is participant-driven. The respondent’s time is time is respected and appreciated: They can respond to moderator questions via a webcam during a lunch break, after work from the comfort of their own home, or late at night after the house has quieted down. Participants respond at leisure, within the project timeline parameters, when they are relaxed, willing and ready to respond with their thoughts, attitudes and opinions in meaningful ways.
This convenience factor leads to better, richer, more thoughtful research. The participant is not feeling harried from cross-town travel or the like. They feel respected, they know participating online is a huge timesaver, and they can concentrate on the task at hand: providing those critical, valued “behind-the-glass” insights researchers and clients crave.
Reason 2: The Significance of Setting
Through this participant-driven video-based method, the researcher gets candour that can only be gathered in this comfortable, relaxed setting - candour crucial to steer campaigns, product development or brand creation (and everything in between).
Mobile “wireless” webcams allow for even deeper beyond-the-glass consumer insights. For example, a researcher could ask a participant to take the webcam with him through his kitchen, pointing out the most-used and most-loved cooking gadgets. In a conference room, the researcher would never be able to have access to this level of depth.
Reason3: The Absence of Peer Pressure
Online video-based qualitative research allows for a situation that is utterly void of alpha males and females. With the online video platform, the participant can have a one-on-one, intimate “conversation” with the moderator. The moderator’s questions are pre-recorded and delivered straight to the consumer, virtually face-to-face. Peer pressure is certainly not a factor, allowing for completely open responses from each participant. Researchers are able to gather insights from every member of the group, wallflowers included.
Reason 4: The Height of Content Intensity
In-person focus groups often result in quite low content intensity. (Content intensity is defined as the amount of insightful data generated by each person in the qualitative research session.) Peer pressure, of course, is a factor here.
Also, because of the nature of online applications, a project can be replicated across a number of locations, and adjustments can easily and quickly be made. For example, questions can be updated or added on the fly to optimize feedback. Finally, projects can be implemented with much more frequency than in-person focus groups due to cost savings and the inherent scalability of web-based platforms
The Best Organisation is a UK partner of Qualvu inc.
The customer journey - where will it end (or even begin?)
We’re hearing that phrase alot there days aren’t we - customer journey. Richard Greenhalgh blogged about it today on Brand Republic:
‘The phrase ‘customer journey’ is in vogue at the moment, and tends to be used in a wide variety of contexts. Tellingly more and more organisations are appointing internal ‘Customer Experience’ teams, though their remit or powers of execution are often unclear. The one thing that is certain however is that there is little consensus on what the customer journey truly means, and how using it effectively can benefit both businesses and consumers.’
The lack of consensus on what it means could well stem from the lack of understanding of where it starts. Does the customer’s journey start at the point at which they take action (e.g entering the supermarket, going online to book) or when they see your ad? Or does it start when they get those first rumblings of a need that isn’t yet fulfilled? In which case the journey could start months before any actually brand engagement or activity takes place. We would suggest it is the latter.
Every journey begins with an emotional trigger which drives the need - a point of realisation that I want something and right now I don’t have it. So in order to find relief from my pain of not having, I must go on a journey to find it. Every sales programme will tell you to ‘find the pain’ then position yourself or your product as the solution.
However, along the path to pain relief is a rollercoaster of excitement (that my need will be fulfilled) and anxiety (that maybe it won’t), disappointment (that it hasn’t been yet or may not be because there is a spanner in the works like a delayed flight or an out of stock product) and elation (finally I have got it!)
So our take would be that to understand the customer’s journey and give them the best possible experience of your product or service along the way, you must get under their skin and understand their emotional triggers and their emotional touchpoints - where and how does their pain turn into excitement and anticipation; what flips them into anxiety or disappointment, and what transmutes that back into elation and fulfillment?
‘Every interaction between customer and brand will have a direct influence on this journey and, ultimately, on the profitability and duration of the resulting relationship. But the reality is that businesses find it very difficult to join up the disparate silos to create an end to end view.’ writes Richard Greenhalgh.
When you map the customers’ emotional journey from trigger to relief (which means you really have to get to know your customers at the bottom of their hearts not just the top of their minds), what you need to do when, how and where to faciliate the best possible physical journey becomes so much more obvious and easier to implement. It becomes easier to see how those disparate silos need to work together. The end to end view is much more visible when you look at it through emotional eyes of your customers.
So if your pain is that you just don’t know your customers’ emotional map and how that relates to their physical journey with you, then allow us to give you some relief and provide it for you.
Brand loyalty – is it down to dopamine?
However, once the animal learns that the tone precedes the arrival of juice, the same neurons begin firing at the sound of the tone instead of the reward. Schultz calls these cells “prediction neurons” since they are more concerned with predicting rewards than receiving them. Once this pattern is memorised, the monkey’s dopamine neurons become exquisitely sensitive to variations on it. If the cellular predictions are correct, and the reward arrives right on time, then the primates experience a brief surge of dopamine, the pleasure of being right.’
These dopamine neuron signals are what allow us to make patterns and predictions in the real world. As long as the pattern is correct and the predicted reward follows, then we get our dopamine ‘fix’ and we feel good. So what does this mean for brand loyalty?
Well it seems reasonable to suggest that for brand-loyalists, their dopamine prediction pattern is that buying the brand gives them the reward of feeling good. And as long as the prediction of the reward is rewarded by ‘being right’, they’ll keep getting their dopamine.
There are however two other highly useful things to know about this in relation to buying behaviours and loyalty. Firstly there is the prediction error signal, which is how we learn what works and what doesn’t. If the event doesn’t produce the predicted reward, we don’t get the dopamine surge and so our sophisticated dopamine neuron predictive system flashes ‘error’. If we experience this error signal more than once or twice our predictive system starts to ‘look’ for rewards elsewhere.
This is what we refer to in NLP terms as cognitive dissonance or pattern interrupts. This is what we want to avoid doing to loyalists, but we certainly want to do with non-loyalists. We want to effect a prediction error signal on their choice of buying other brands or own label products.
How might we do this? The answer might be in another aspect of the dopamine reward system: the unpredictable reward.
Three or four times as much dopamine is released when an event produces an unexpected reward. The dopamine prediction error signal suddenly gets a nice surprise and then starts to pay attention to this thing that might create a reward again in the future. Is this why special offers work so well? An unexpected dopamine rush makes us feel soooo good. BUT if we want to maintain the effectiveness of the surprise, it has to be linked or anchored with something that will maintain the dopamine surge for the future; it has to create a new predictable pattern for that good feeling.
In other words a special offer may create the pattern interrupt we seek to get the non-loyals to shift, but something else has to happen as well to keep them and convert them to loyals. A series of dopamine rushes may be needed to get them ‘hooked’ again. This has interesting implications perhaps for the efficacy of certain marketing tactics and the sequencing of employing them.
It all comes down to one thing: what is valuable to your customers?
I was browsing through McKinsey Quarterly this evening and came across this report on Maintaining Customer Experience from December 2008.
I quote… ‘How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs? Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction. Specifically, companies should challenge their beliefs about service and test those beliefs analytically. Many will discover that long-held, but seldom-reviewed, assertions about what customers really want are wrong.
Sophisticated companies that figure out what matters most to customers, eliminate the investments that don’t matter, and finance the ones that do, will thrive—and may find themselves, when the economy returns to normal, with fewer competitors.’
I have a moment of deja vu here. Isn’t that what I posted on here yesterday?
The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those [customer] values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not.
One of the most rewarding things about the work we do at The Best Organisation is the ability to show clients where they can save money and get a better return on their ROI, by understanding what is important to their customers, i.e. those ‘drivers of satisfaction’. It’s also rewarding to know that the authors of that McKinsey report (Adam Braff and John C DeVine) are singing from our hymn sheet too.
Why is it so hard to talk to women?
Men may still be the higher wage earners in most households, but women are the main holders of the purse strings, deciding what to cut back on, how much to save, and what to spend the hard-earned cash on. From techno-gadgets to the weekly shop, home decor to utility bills, women are the decision-makers (even when they let the men think that they are).
Belinda Parmar of Lady Geeks reckons the tech brands could be missing out on £0.5 billion in revenue by not marketing to women. ‘Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see battle for the living room) where much of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. ‘
Yet marketers seem to find it so difficult to talk to women? Is it because there are more male marketers? Is it because women are so complex? Is it that the marketing world just hasn’t learned women-speak? Or is it something else?
Perhaps the gender dynamics model developed by Pauline Crawford and Alana Mitchell can throw some light on the matter. ‘Not all women are the same, yet they are all ‘female’. Likewise with men; they do not all behave the same yet they are ‘male’. We all have within us mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics, preferences, and behaviours.
While having a female body means women have unique body parts and cycles, some women may be more ‘male’ in their thinking, decision making and in their logical responses, while many females portray the classic all female traits of nurturing, sensitivity and intuitive reasoning. Likewise within men, some may be more ‘female’ in their thinking preferences, emotional reactions, and actions and still be male through and through!’
A mere conversation about cars and handbags with Pauline and my colleague Di, bore this out. Pauline (the more masculine thinker of the three of us) wants great performance in her car and pure practicality in her handbag. Di (more feminine thinking) wants comfort and reliability in her car and a soft, squishy handbag. I (sitting in the middle ground) went for beauty and quirkiness in both, with scant regard for practicality, performance, comfort or reliability!
What is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of how to talk to women is that the language you use will vary depending on where on the masculine/feminine scale your female audience sits. So you’d need to have that knowledge as a fundamental pillar to your marketing strategy. Pointless trying sell a performance car to the Di’s of this world or a squishy handbag to the Pauline’s. But get the targetting and the language right and you are onto a winner!
In addition, your female buyers will have placed your product or brand in a specific context in their lives, they will have certain criteria relating to that context and they will have a whole other set of unconscious thought processes that drive their actual buying behaviours at the point of purchase.
It would be pretty good to know all these things before you start lavishing spending this year’s severely cut budgets. It would definitely make a difference to your ROI.
Our predictions for 2009
We’ve been walking our talk recently and checking in with our customers to be sure we understand what is of real value to them. It has been quite illuminating and very, very useful. It is helping us shape our business direction, our marketing and sales activity and the way in which we communicate. It has helped us define the language of our customers and enabled us to speak it more fluently.
And this is what we have given our customers that is so valuable to them:
A much deeper understanding of what is really important to their customers (what really makes them buy that brand) - creating a brand personality that they struggle to develop in any other way
A lexicon of their customers’ language which they can apply across all media (from TV ads to pack design and merchandising to shop layouts) and from which they can write much better creative briefs
The training to make sure they can speak their bespoke customers’ language fluently and that there is common understanding within the whole team
Additional rich, new and illuminating insights that are both strategic and action oriented
Customer-driven business knowledge that can be executed immediately
Presentations/debriefs/workshops they actually enjoy and stay awake throughout
For a long time we have been banging this drum that the key to successful sales and marketing is speaking the customers’ language and developing dialogue with customers in their language not yours. The companies that do that have seen phenomenal results - e.g 155% sales uplift from one TV ad, a store refurbishment that cost one tenth of the usual spend, a way above target increase in transaction value, redirection of a training budget giving a significantly better ROI, a product saved from bombing by a subtle shift in pack ingredients.
So our prediction for 2009 is this. Those companies that actively seek to learn and fluently speak their customers’ language and to understand their unique brand personality, will thrive and flourish even in this gloomy economic climate. Those companies that insist on shouting louder and more slowly at their customers in the company’s language will at best survive and at worst go down the pan.
Every business regardless of size lives or dies on cashflow. The key to good cashflow is customers putting their hands in their pockets. They are much more willing to do that for brands that they value and that speak their language.
Here’s to a very prosperous 2009.
It is indeed a question of behaviour!
Hats off to Mark Ritson in this week’s Marketing magazine for banging the same drum that we have been banging since the mid 1990’s. He writes that ‘focusing on what consumers do, not what they say they do, is key to building effective strategies.’ Actually we go one stage further - focus on what the customer is focusing on and then seek to understand what is driving them to focus on that. Therein lies the key to their behaviour and the success of your strategies.
Ritson also says ‘I have umpteen war stories of focus group findings and opinion surveys that sent me and my client in the wrong direction from the consumer behaviour we were trying to predict’.
We also have plenty of experience of clients going down the wrong track and then asking us for help in getting back on the right one. The problem is, as Ritson points out, customers do not do what they say they will do. But they will repeat behaviours that they have done in the past - in fact they are programmed to do so! So the answer is to model what they have already done. That way you get a much better predictor of how they will behave in the future.
Truly impactful customer modelling and mapping that gets to the heart of the customer, their focus and their behaviour, is an art. It is not done to the customer, it is extracted from them. Rather like taking a blank canvas and enabling the customer to paint their real story upon it. It’s not about prediction based on opinions, attitudes or hypotheses. It is about future behaviour projection based on mapping actual behaviour in the past.
You see, there are certain drivers of behaviour and motivation that we all display in the different contexts of our lives. Knowing which ones are in play in a specific context is crucial to understanding how we are likely to behave when we are in that context again.
Let’s just look at an example. Marketing cites New Coke as famous failed prediction. ‘In 1985, Coca-Cola ran more than 200,000 blind taste tests on its new Coke formula. When results revealed that a majority preferred the new taste to traditional Coke and Pepsi, the company launched the new formula. The public hated it. Research had failed to account for the difference between blind product tests and real brand loyalty.’
The problem was not that the research got the wrong answer - the problem was that it did not ask the right question. It did not ask whether Coke customers were motivated by trying new and different products (even within the brand) or by sticking to the same old favourite they loved. Had they asked that question, they would have known that customers would not accept a ‘new’ replacement Coke, even if they preferred the taste. They might have accepted it though, if it was marketed as the same old Coke they knew and loved, just with a slightly improved taste. It might have been a whole different story - or maybe the same story with an improved ending - for Coca-Cola. Note how they have succeeded with brand extension (Diet Coke, Diet with Lemon etc) -but these are additions not replacements.
Discovering the point of greatest leverage to influence the customer to repeat their behaviour in your favour, is the intuitive art within the art of customer mapping. As the old story goes, the value is not in how hard you tap the pipe, it’s in knowing precisely where to tap. You can’t know where to tap, if you don’t know your customer’s map!
Insight and creativity do mix
In the recent edition of Research (October 2008), the magazine of the Market Research Society, Anna Cliffe, head of research at Brahm, asks can researchers and advertising creatives ever get on? She writes ‘Developing and evaluating advertising creative has long been one of the most exciting and controversial areas of research. The relationship between research and advertising agencies has traditionally been one of wariness, if not outright hostility. Research can be seen as stifling to the creative process, with adverts developed ‘by committee’ and preventing creative expression.’
Cliffe goes on to discuss what she believes researchers bring to the creative process, and whether they should research the creative work as well as provide the insight for it. ‘Is there a case for the researcher - who should know the consumer better than anyone - being an integral part of the creative process, and then to evaluate the resulting campaign, being so much closer to where the campaign came from?’
We have some views on this too. If the research work has truly done its job and provided the best insight into the customer’s sensory and emotional motivation to buy, then the creative brief should flow easily from it. If the creative team are worth their salt and have that best brief, they should be able to produce an ad that scores a direct hit on those sensory and emotional hot buttons (and there should be no need for ‘meddling’ by anyone, which seems to be the creatives’ greatest beef).
Then the researchers, who provided these insights, should be able to research the creative work objectively and with an open mind - where the only decision is which creative treatment scored the strongest hit.
Perhaps some reference to the previous post on The Power of Instinct also comes into play. Seasoned researchers, who understand the creative process and have developed their instinct and wisdom through their experience, should be able to objectively ad test without ‘meddling’. And their understanding of the customer’s perspective should be a positive bonus rather than a bain to the creative team.
Perhaps the potential ‘meddling’ is more down to a lack of understanding of the customer’s real focus and their decision-drivers (by all involved) than the researcher’s lack of understanding of the creative process.