Consumer Centric

I came across a few online research platforms this morning that are new to me.  It sort of spread to a little hunting expedition, which led to a few more interesting discoveries.  Here’s a snapshot of my quick read on a few.

Revelation and QualVu were both launched in 2007.  They stand out to me, however, because they’re legit social media-style platforms, but built the way a researcher would think and want to use the information.

Revelation appears to be the next generation of blog, chat room and bulletin board type research tools.

QualVu is a very robust online video sharing platform.  Their VideoDiary product is a complete solution for easily facilitating face-to-face and/or personal video diary-stye feedback from real people in their real environments.

I can’t wait to try them both out.  I’ve heard QualVu has been used by a lot of people.  I’ve still not found a Revelation user yet.  I’d love to get real user feedback.

Of course, this little discovery led to a chase down of a few other interesting tools worth checking out.  One I already bought a subscription to this morning after finding it.

First, CiviCom has it’s own set of 3-D virtual community solutions for marketing research.  I’m not totally certain on the nature of this company in terms of being built by researchers for researchers.  But the idea of helping to facilitate interactive collaboration in virtual environments is very cool.

My favorite find of the day (or the one I really hope works as I’ve bought an initial month subscription to give it a shot) is GuapoVideo.  What I love about this is it is built for internal audiences to collectively annotate and analyze video gathered through research.  Brilliant idea — a tool to help make internal collaboration and co-creation even easier.  It’s like a video-editing suite built from a researcher point of view to upload, annotate, and then cut and past clips into your presentations or share via a web page they create for you.

I also wonder if GuapoVideo could also be used as a way to reach back to the person(s) you interviewed and have them respond to your interpretation of their comments in a more co-creative way.  An added-value step in a hybrid research or ethnographic project.

A funny, but practical one, too.  Ask500People is a totally different online feedback tool, but one brand managers, account planners, and strategists could use in a pinch to get some basic feedback on concepts, ideas, etc.  While I take issue with the way they represent margin of error for polls on their site (I wouldn’t call this scientific sampling for the market research purests by any stretch of the imagination), the concept of a quick question feedback tool is an example of easy, collaborative methods for getting others to think about the issues you’re consider.

Finally, in my brief field trip to discover interesting online research tools I came across this informative slideshare presentation by Carol Phillips of Brand Amplitude.

Share more you’ve come across that have been helpful.

A recent discussion in a LinkedIn group led me to consider an interesting question, even if academic:  What’s more important, the answer to the question WHY or the question HOW?

I’m sure you’re thinking, like I was, it totally depends the intended application of the answer to those two questions.  Are we talking about doing something ourselves (why should I? vs. how do I?)?  Are we interested in understanding someone else’s behavior (why did you? vs. how did you?)?  Or, are we trying to teach someone else something (why do you want to? vs. how do you?)?

Just thinking about it top-of-mind it’s easy to see that both questions (why and how) can yield meaningful answers.

In my professional life we are always trying to understand human behavior in order to innovate marketing and/or product solutions with and for our clients.  To me, I’ve come to find that the answer to WHY has significantly more meaning when understood within the context of the HOW.  I’m specifically referring to the answers to these questions in this way:  WHY do you do something, want something, or believe something; and, HOW do you do, seek, or believe something.  Looked at in this manner, the answer to HOW you experience that journey (think of a purchase cycle, a career decision, choosing a doctor, etc.) is most important because it shows you at what points and in what ways you have a chance to play a meaningful role.

As a company or a brand, you are in a much stronger position to create relevance, interaction, and utility in the lives of your audience (consumers, customers, prospects, etc.) if you understand HOW their journey is experienced; then the answer to the WHY has some meaningful context. It is in the context where powerful innovations come in terms of how to connect with people through your marketing, products, and/or services.

Consider this example.  Smoking cessation has been studied for decades. Clinically, doctors know why people continue to smoke because of the addictive power of nicotine, etc. Socially and functionally and emotionally, however, there are many more reasons why in terms of the benefits a smoker derives from the behavior. At the same time, many organizations have studies why people quit smoking — health concerns, family pressure, etc.

As a result, smoking cessation marketing for years focused on scaring people about the health concerns. Everyone today knows that, so the most recent trend for several years has been to promote the use of tips and tricks (mostly pharmaceutical) such as the patch or nicotine gum, etc. It works for many, but far more try to quit and then end up returning to smoking.

We focused our study for the American Legacy Foundation on HOW people successfully quit so we could understand WHY they do what they do in context. The result was a clear pathway toward resolve that must be followed for a successful quit attempt: desire to quit smoking, eager for life without cigarettes, acceptance for changes I must make, ready to make those changes, and confidence you will succeed. If a smoker skips this path to resolve, it’s highly likely they will not succeed in a quit attempt.

So, what did it mean to marketing and product innovation? The American Legacy Foundation developed the Re-Learn campaign as part of their EX initiative. Instead of telling people to quit, they created TV ads, OOH executions, an online community, and other experiences that help smokers first identify why you smoke and then determine how to re-learn life without cigarettes. If you go to BecomeAnEx.org you’ll find a community of people sharing triggers for smoking and methods for replacing those triggers with healthier solutions. Once you’ve built resolve in this manner you’re asked to set a quit date.

When you understand HOW a decision is made, the WHY has the needed context to help you know how to connect. When you do this, you have a real chance to create relevance, interact, and add utility in people’s lives that results in a meaningful relationship with you (brand, product, company, cause, etc.).

I recently listened to a webcast by Tony Ulwick, CEO, Strategyn about his company’s approach to Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). The focus was innovation strategies to reach growth objectives by developing product solutions based on a clear understanding of the “jobs” people are looking to solve in their life.

Couldn’t agree more with the basic premise that Ulwick is promoting:  people are buying products to get jobs done; therefore, companies need to understand these “jobs” better in order to create successful solutions.  He defined a job as a task, goal, or objective a person is trying to accomplish or a problem they are trying to resolve.

“Customers migrate to products that get the job done best,” Ulwick explained.

This is music to my ears.  And Strategyn appears to have perfected the process of identifying and prioritizing consumer jobs and the desired outcomes that real people are seeking.  They use these insights to identify areas of opportunity and, ultimately, help their clients implement a growth strategy based on product innovation in those areas.

This simple insight (focusing on the jobs that real people are looking to solve) has as much application to marketing innovation as it does to products and services.  In the end, it is all about a company being relevant by providing genuine utility for someone.

The path I’ve been on for a few years now has followed a similar logic train as Ulwick…

People are not only buying products to get jobs done, they are consuming media and interacting with various influencers (people, places, and things) to get jobs done in their lives.  Within the context of marketing communications, let’s refer to these media and influencers more broadly as “channels”.  Like products they sell, these channels represent various opportunities, levers, or tactics that marketers can tap into in order to be relevant to real people.

In this way, the line between a product or service and a channel is becomingly increasingly hard to draw.  Consider the obvious examples of Nike Plus and apples iPhone.  Is access to tools and a community to help you track your running a product, service, or marketing channel?  Is an iPhone app a marketing channel or a product?  Both.

It follows, then, that understanding the jobs people are looking to solve in their lives can equally influence new products or new marketing channels you create.  And we can best understand these jobs by mapping the dynamics of the “system” in which these jobs operate–in this context a system is the interaction between people, influencers, products/services, and companies.

For example, think about the last time you went out to eat and you chose an Applebee’s or Olive Garden or Chili’s, some casual dining restaurant.  The system in this case includes you, the people you went out to eat with (we rarely go alone), the things that influenced your decision where to go, the food you ate, and the experience you had.  The jobs you were looking to solve range from the functional (hunger) to the emotional (social interaction), and could include any number of different things.

Ulwick’s approach, if you were one of those restaurants looking to improve your product, would be to understand what jobs you were looking to resolve through that visit.  And he’d likely probe multiple scenarios to get the full range of eating out jobs.  From that, you can see how it would be easy to define specific outcomes you (the one eating at the restaurant) are looking for when you go to a restaurant.  We could then measure how important each outcome is to you and find out how satisfied you are with the various options available to you to deliver that outcome.  This is awesome and makes total sense.

I would go a step further.  What if we were to study the jobs that you were looking to resolve at different steps of the process you went through in deciding where to go eat?  We’d likely learn that you had a set of restaurants you like, you quickly determined which met your key needs (the jobs referenced in the earlier graph), then you took your choice to the group of friends you were going out to eat with, and then you ended up going to the place that some other guy preferred.  Your experience at the restaurant would then help you decide where you’d go next time.

Mapping the entire decision cycle in this way gives us more jobs to define, and specific jobs we can assign not to the product but to the channels that help you arrive at your decision.  The simple act of thinking what restaurants you might be interested in at a particular time and place is the first job you’re looking to resolve.  In selecting the restaurant for the group you’re dealing with a slightly different job:  successful negotiation, and success can be defined in many ways.

Knowing this, we can determine which channels are most effective at shaping your short list versus facilitating negotiation. Perhaps the actual experience and/or word-of-mouth recommendations are the best at the short list, while coupons, limited-time offers, or promotional events are the most effective at helping you win in negotiation (get to go to the restaurant you like by giving people a reason to like it, too).

Armed with this information, a marketer can see where certain decision-making process gaps are and find new and better ways to solve real jobs that real people face.  These solutions, then, are as likely to be marketing channel innovation as they are new product innovation.

Kudos to Strategyn for the work they’re doing in this area.  I think the big opportunity that is even more real in the digital world today is to apply this thinking to both marketing and product innovation.

Ulwick referenced a quote by Christensen in his book Innovative Solution:  ”The job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to develop products that customers will buy.”

I would make a slight modification… the job is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes to be relevant and add utility in people’s lives through the products and experiences they create.

A little long… but, hopefully, you get the point.

A long day in the LA area yielded two bizarre encounters with strange marketing practices. One seems innovative and cool but with a few weird elements, the other was ridiculously frustrating.

First, between meetings this morning, Andy Hunter and I were looking for some food and a solid WiFi connection.  I suppose where we ended up was the last place we’d expected to look:  the ING Direct Cafe at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and I-405.

That’s right, a cafe branded entirely by banking services ING Direct!  You can get food, drinks, and WiFi for incredibly cheap prices for surprisingly good food.

Why would ING Direct do this?  They explain on their site as follows:

We believe saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee. So we invite you to come in and experience just how refreshing it is to sip a latte, surf the Internet for free and talk to us about how we can help you Save Your Money.

Given the prices for some really good food, I’d say their claim to save your money is accurate.  And during the time we ate neither of us was pursued by financial services sales people.  

Turns out ING Direct has eight cafes across the country (NYC, Philly, Chicago, Honolulu, Wilmington, St. Cloud).  While it first seemed strange, it’s an innovative concept that delivers on the promise and stretches to a connection to the brand.

The strange part?  Aside from trying to figure out why ING Direct had a Cafe, the glass-enclosed bathrooms took the prize.  Sure, you couldn’t exactly see through the glass, but the idea of catching the shadows of the person in the bathroom was odd.

Then, in the men’s room at least, the ING Direct Cafe designers had some fun with marketing and branding by placing ING spelled out in braille above the urinal.  

I had to snap a picture as I sat there wondering what in the world it said.  I couldn’t figure out what you possibly would want to communicate via braille in that specific location.  Thanks to some Twitter friends I learned it spells out their brand name:  ING.

The net takeaway:  find a relevant value (save money on good food and get free WiFi while you wait) and offer it in a disruptive way that results in a memorable experience (put a cafe into a bank, etc.).  Way to go ING!

You made an impression upon me… and I now think of ING Direct being a partner to help me build strategies to not just make money, but to save money.

Wacky encounter number two…  Headed back to the airport hotel we were on our way to drop of the Hertz Rental Car but realized we needed to get gas.  As I quickly put in my card to prepay (or authorize) for use of the pump, I saw a question pop up on the screen that I’d once again next never thought I’d see.

Apparently, I was being asked by the machine if I wanted a $0.45 fee to use the card, or not.  Naturally, I selected no (why would I want to pay a fee?).  Then, I received a second message explaining that the card I was trying to use was rejected.

After trying to get the card to work I finally had to go into the am/pm convenience store and pay at the cashier.  I was then told in no uncertain terms that the gas station does not accept credit cards, only debit cards.  The clerk tried to convince me that my check card was not a debit card… but I finally gave up and just paid with cash.

Wow, was that frustrating.  It turns out this trend of not allowing credit cards is growing and started the summer of 2008 as gas prices rose as did the fee the station is charged for each time the card is used.  

While I’ve found mixed opinions online about whether we should care about not being able to pay with a credit card, the inconvenience and frustration of not being able to complete a task that I’ve grown accustomed to being quite simple and easy was palpable.  That was a major step back to the 70s or 80s when the only option was cash.  In fact, the only reason I stayed at the station and paid with cash was because I had no choice given time and the need to fill the rental up before dropping it off.

In the real world of normal life, removing basic steps that make the purchase experience easy for the customer is not innovative marketing.  It’s ignoring the user experience to save a buck–in the end, the am/pm convenience store will lose one or two more than they save.

Thank you LA area for two wacky finds in a single day!