Category Archives: Customer Relationships

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #4: Details Make the Difference

PartnersstatueThere are a lot of theme parks in Southern California. The competition for Disneyland is tough. Yet, for over 50 years now, the pattern has been the same. People plan their vacation around Disneyland, spending 3 to 5 days at the park, and may add a day at one of the other parks – Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. If you looked at the size of the theme park pie and the slice that Disney carves off, the imbalance would be remarkable. Why does Disney suck up over 80 cents of every theme park dollar spent in the region?

It’s not the rides. Universal’s rides are probably more technically impressive. Magic Mountain and Knott’s certainly has more thrilling rides. Disney’s biggest coaster, California Screamin’, is a rather mild ride for a coaster fanatic (which I am).

I believe there are several reasons, and I’ll try to deal with them in individual posts. Today, I want to talk about attention to detail.

The Hotchkiss Detail Obsessive Guide to Disneyland

My family has been to Disneyland at least 6 times. People hate visiting the park with us because we have routines (others are less kind and call them rituals, or cult-like behavior) that have to be adhered to. It’s important which side of the train station you enter onto Main Street on. And you don’t rush past the circle at the top of the street. You spend a few minutes lingering and drinking in the atmosphere. You either stroll (never rush) down main street or take the horse drawn tram. You may stop at the Blue Ribbon Bakery for a coffee. You make your way to the Partners statue at the center of the park for a few minutes with Walt and Mickey and while you’re there, pay particular attention to the flowers planted around them. Take note, because they may be completely different tomorrow. From the center in front of the Castle, we then veer to the left, usually ambling through Adventureland and head towards New Orleans Square because the first ride has to be (this is non-negotiable) Pirates of the Caribbean.

Pirates is one of our favorite rides, earning it’s place as a Hotchkiss Tradition. And it’s not because it’s thrilling (it’s not) or technically amazing (although it may have been with the ride debuted in 1967). It’s because the attention to detail on this ride is simply amazing. It’s the last ride that Walt himself personally oversaw the design of. Everything has been thought through, down to the smallest scar, gold doubloon or cobweb. And that is the Disney difference. You won’t find that fanatic attention to detail in Universal, Knott’s or Magic Mountain. It’s a Disney hallmark.

It’s What You Do Between the Rides that Counts

Disney knows that in between the momentary jolts of adrenaline, it’s the details that build an experience worthy of a 3 or 4 day investment of your family’s time. Disneyland has this down in spades. Each square foot is jammed with amazing detail, carefully crafted and maintained to add to the experience. And I’m not even talking the obscure Disney-mania touches like Hidden Mickies. I’m talking about carefully planned sight lines, well placed benches, meticulously groomed greenery and the architectural detail on buildings, to say nothing of the imagination fuelling touches found in rides like Splash Mountain, Peter Pan, the Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones. The competition cut corners. Walt absolutely forbid that in the making of Disneyland.

The post-Walt Disney Parks have struggled with this. We’ve been going to Disneyland for over 20 years now, and the overall look of the park hasn’t changed much. Toontown was added and a few new rides have debuted, but 50 years of planning and development have created an almost perfect entertainment experience. Major overhauls aren’t needed. The same can’t be said for Disney’s California Adventure. Disney is currently overhauling huge sections of the park because the same detailed magic was missing. Visitors treat California Adventure more like a typical theme park, rushing from major attraction to major attraction without lingering to enjoy the experience on the way. Of all the rides in California Adventure, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is one of the few engineered to the same standards of detail that you’ll find in the earlier rides. But this legacy of detail isn’t found so much in the rides, but rather the transition zones between the rides. It’s here where the acid test of detail is really found. It’s detail that keeps crowds amused while they’re waiting in line. It’s detail that keeps them from feeling like cattle, shunted from one chute to the next.

Most Skip the Details, Disney Doesn’t

So what’s the takeaway? Disney’s eye for detail came from an absolute certainty about what his visitor’s wanted and an iron-willed determination to deliver that without any compromise. Every last element of the visitor experience was considered and planned for. Every detail you see in Disneyland had a purpose – to make the visitor happy.

I think too many corporations rush past the details when it comes to the experiences of their customers. It’s because details take time. They’re hard work. You can get lost in a forest of detail. And obsessing over detail just doesn’t seem that profitable. In fact, if you get lost in the wrong details, it can be sure death for a corporation. But yet, details make the difference for Disney. Why? How does Disney avoid the trap of paying attention to the wrong details? They know which details are important because they take the time to understand what is important to their visitors. They spend a lot of time thinking about how visitors perceive and interact with those details. This is a legacy from Walt. It comes from a leader that obsesses about details.

Apple and the User Experience: A Lesson Learned

iPad-gallery-books1Another example of attention to detail is Apple. They obsess about the user experience. I recently watched someone demo their new iPad. You know what was one of the first things he showed me? How the iPad mimicked the look of turning an actual physical page in a book. Depending on where you place your finger on the page, the page itself curls up appropriately. It’s a silly little detail, but it was important in creating a Wow experience for this new owner. And it’s something that stood out to me as one reason why, eventually, I have to get an iPad. It’s a feature that probably took an absolutely silly number of hours of programming to implement but it was important to Apple because it was important to users.

Detail can differentiate you from the competition. It adds a premium to the value you provide. It tells the customer that you value them as users (or visitors), not just as another wallet to be emptied.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #3: Leadership Matters…a Lot!

walt-and-roy-01How many companies today are run by caretakers? How many of the Fortune 500 are run by CEO’s who are really just thinly disguised accountants?

The Leader of a company determines the heart and soul of that company. If you run the company by your profit and loss statements, you’ll end up with a fiscally responsible corporation that will slowly screw itself into the ground. If you have a reckless leader, you’ll flame and burn in spectacular style. Somewhere in between the extremes is where you have to live

Walt Disney was not overly concerned by fiscal responsibility. That was Roy, his brother’s job. Walt drove the company by embracing risk. Roy lost his hair by trying to balance Walt’s enthusiasm.

Risk is the fuel that drives the future. And risk is risk. It can only be calculated up to a certain point. After that, you have to close your eyes and jump. Walt jumped again, and again, and again, each with spectacular style.

1923 – Walt moved to Hollywood from Kansas City with a short film called Alice’s Wonderland that he hoped would net him a distribution contract. The film was pretty much all Walt had. He managed to secure a contract and teetered on the edge of bankruptcy for 4 years. And just when he looked like he had a winner, in a new cartoon character called Oswald the Rabbit, the distributor stole both the rights and the animators, shutting Walt out.

1928 – After losing Oswald, Walt started from scratch with Mickey Mouse. But he only created two cartoons with the new character before deciding to risk it all with the first sound cartoon. The struggling studio dumped everything they had into the cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Luckily, Walt’s gamble paid off. Mickey was a hit.

1937 – Building on the success of Steamboat Willie, Disney turned out a series of profitable Mickey Mouse cartoons, and added the Silly Symphony series, netting himself a number of Academy Awards in the process for pushing the boundaries of animation technology and art. but Walt soon found a new dream worthy of risk – the first full length animated movie. It what was quickly becoming predictable behaviour for Walt, he risked all their profits from the animated shorts on Snow White. And, as before, it was a phenomenal success, becoming the highest grossing movie until Gone with the Wind bumped it from it’s perch.

In it’s following releases, Disney struggled with finding the right balance between budget and profitability. The war restricted access to foreign markets so profits relied on domestic audiences. Walt continued to push the envelope of what was possible with animation in Disney’s next two releases, Pinocchio and Fantasia. This came at a cost – a budget that meant these films didn’t break even until decades after their debut (thanks to eventual release on VHS and DVD). Walt continually tried to find the right balance between artistic accomplishment and profitability, eventually finding a happy middle ground with classics like Bambi, Cinderella and Mary Poppins (another technical and artistic milestone). It’s amazing to consider how quickly animation progressed, from the primitiveness of Steamboat Willie to the polished art of Show White in just 9 short years.

In the interim Walt also explored TV and live action features, finding significant success in both. Finally, it seemed, Disney had found the groove that led to sustained profitability. Almost any other leader would cling to this groove for dear life, building up the bank account and enjoying the rewards that come with success. Not Walt.

1955 – Walt got restless when he stayed in one place too long. he became bored with incremental improvement, no matter how profitable it proved to be. Walt thrived on risk and new, monumental challenges. And so, he looked for a new one. Walt was 54 years old and had been running Disney, in one form or another, for 35 years. By any measure you might want to apply, he was successful. And he risked all this, everything, on a new dream – an entertainment park. Disneyland represented Walt’s biggest roll of the dice yet, because he had everything to lose.

This restlessness and desire to push the limits epitomized the Disney company for the first 45 years of its history. Walt and the company were really one and the same. His leadership determined the soul of the company. When he died of lung cancer at the age of 66, he left a hole in the heart of Disney that took years to mend (and some might say Walt was never successfully replaced). Never let it be said that one person does not determine the direction of a huge corporation. Disney was testament to the fact that a single person’s vision and ideals can shape and guide a company for decades. This is not the job for a caretaker or bean counter. This is a job for someone who can grasp the impossible and shape the future.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #2: Values are Non-Negotiable

Walt_young_featureWalt Disney’s values were forged in the hardscrabble reality of Kansas City, growing up in a family led by a father that never was quite able to grab success by the tail. Walt was a deeply spiritual individual who held the importance of American and Family values above all else. He spent the rest of his life pursuing an ideal – that of clean wholesome family entertainment. Walt was scrupulous about it. I suspect the adult movies that are now released through Disney’s production arm, Touchstone Films, would have earned a disapproving frown from Walt. Yet of all the major studios, Disney is still the one synonymous with family entertainment.

The normally affable Walt could quickly become contentious when his values came into debate. He drove the overall moral tone of Disney entertainment with an iron will. The door was open for technical and creative innovation, but heaven help the poor Disney employee who let their moral guard slip, even for an instant. It’s only very recently that Disney Park employees were allowed to have a beard, a mustache (ironic, considering Walt himself sported one) or sideburns. Walt felt facial hair detracted from the clean, wholesome image he wanted to maintain in his parks. And the classic Disney films each strove to be more than entertainment – they each carried a strong moral message, usually about the value of a strong family unit.

Whether or not you agreed with Walt’s highly idealistic views, you had to admire the ardor with which he defended them. Walt felt that a corporation without real values was a soulless organization without direction. And his values still live in Disney’s corporate values today:

Values Make Our Brands Stand Out

    * Innovation
          o We follow a strong tradition of innovation.

    * Quality
          o We strive to follow a high standard of excellence.
          o We maintain high-quality standards across all product categories.

    * Community
          o We create positive and inclusive ideas about families.
          o We provide entertainment experiences for all generations to share.

    * Storytelling
          o Every product tells a story.
          o Timeless and engaging stories delight and inspire.

    * Optimism
          o At The Walt Disney Company, entertainment is about hope, aspiration and positive resolutions.

    * Decency
          o We honor and respect the trust people place in us.
          o Our fun is about laughing at our experiences and ourselves.

Are they defended as strongly as they were when Walt was alive? I suspect not, yet it’s a testament to the man that for must of us, Disney and family values are synonymous.

Values are a highly personal thing. You might not subscribe to the same values that Walt did. But the fact is, values have to live at the heart of an organization. They breathe life into it and give it a purpose that’s not open to negotiation or compromise. They are the bearing points that can always be relied on. They stand above profit statements and quarterly earning reports. If they don’t, all you have is a bunch of people standing around trying to figure out the best way to make money. And there are better things in life than that.

10 Things I Learned from Disney – #1: Dreams Make a Difference

waltdisneyMy friend and fellow Search Insider columnist, Aaron Goldman, has gained a lot of mileage from one column. Sometime ago, he wrote a column entitled “Everything I Need to Know about Marketing I Learned from Google”. Since then, he’s managed to stretch that out into dozens of columns and an upcoming book. For the next few weeks, I’d like to take inspiration from Aaron and share a few things that Disney has taught me. I don’t expect to get nearly the same mileage that Aaron did (possibly because I don’t have the same attention span) but it’s certainly not because Disney is any less inspirational than Google. For me, Disney presents one of the great corporate histories of the 20th century and Walt has always been one of my personal heroes. But, I will restrict myself to 10 blog posts, one for each of the lessons that Disney has taught me about life and business success. So, let’s start with Lesson One:

Dreams Make a Difference

Walt Disney was possibly the biggest dreamer of the 20th century. Walt always had his gaze firmly focused not the future, quickly moving on from past successes. The next “thing” was always the most important “thing.”  He knew if you spent too much time patting yourself on the back, you’d have your sights focused on where you’ve been, not where you’re going.

In behavioural economics, there’s a saying, “Loss looms larger than gain.” Most of us, faced with a decision of protecting what we have vs. risking it all for a potential future gain tend to circle the wagons and protect the piggy bank. Not Walt. Walt drove his brother Roy crazy by constantly betting it all on a bigger and better dream. For much of it’s history, Disney rode a roller coaster that came frighteningly close to bankruptcy on more than one occasion.

Walt knew that dreams are the fuel that drive us forward. Dreams that focus forward can be achieved with passion and purpose. Dreams that look backward are just one step away from regret. We can do nothing about the past, but we can do something about the future.

Walt was much more than a dreamer, however. Unrealized dreams have not influence on the world beyond the holder of the dream. And that was the magic of Walt. Somehow, he was able to make dreams come true. He knew how to sell dreams, infusing them in others and thereby inspiring them. His dreams were highly contagious, spreading from him (and eventually his brother) through his company outwards to a circle of financiers and partners. Eventually, his dreams reached far enough to touch each one of us.

Disney has not dreamed quite as big or successfully since Walt’s passing, but it’s still a corporation that knows the power of a dream. It has a history of recognizing dreamers and providing the superstructure required to lift those dreams up to the heights.

In Disneyland there is a plaque that says, “It all started with a mouse.” But really, it started with a dream. Walt Disney knew how to take a dream and leverage it to move the world. Powerful stuff indeed!

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

First published March 4, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell, Danny, don’t yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good-natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.

I suspect there will be no shortage of coverage on the keynote and the areas explored. Ballmer was careful to tone down his enthusiasm about Bing with a realistic nod to Google’s current dominance. But there was one comment in particular that I want to explore a little further today. Ballmer made all the obligatory comments about us being very early in the game a search, an observation that has become rote in search interviews. And usually, that observation refers to the user experience, the functionality or the platform from which we search.  But Ballmer purposely singled out one area that is not generally talked about when we discuss the nascence of search — the revenue model.

The Crystallization of a Revenue Model

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But it’s unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Here’s what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need  — the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a “click,” the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

It’s Not That Simple Anymore

But here’s what’s happening now: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going “under the hood,”  powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. We’re demanding more from search — more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online — finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps — search will just be another piece of that functionality. This “usefulness” explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility.

Google, Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue-producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect it’s this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made — far more revenue, in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

The 150 Millisecond Gap: The Timing of Brand Love

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting room at Simon Fraser University, looking at two squiggly lines on a graph in a Powerpoint slide. In fact, five of us in the room were all looking at it intently. Among the five of us, there was a PhD and a handful of Masters degrees in Neurology and Psychology. I contributed nothing to this impressive collection of academic achievement. Still, there was something on the chart that fascinated me.

SI140gapimage

The chart was the result of a neuroscanning experiment we conducted with SFU and Isabel Taake and Dr. Mario Liotti last year.  We were exploring how the brain responded to brands we like, brands we don’t like and brands we could care less about. The study was an ERP (Event Related Brain Potential) study. The idea of the study was to divide up the groups, based on brands they buy and brands they don’t buy and measure their brain waves as they’re presented with pictures of the brands with an EEG scanner. After, these waves were averaged and the averages of each group were compared with each other. What we were looking for were differences between the waves. We were looking for gaps.

It turned out we found two gaps. The brain waves are measured based on time, in millisecond increments. When we initially did the study, we were looking for something called the DM effect. This effect has been shown to represent a difference in how we encode memories and how effective we are in retrieving them later. We wanted to see if well liked brands showed different levels of brain activity when it came to memory encoding than neutral or disliked brands. The answer, as it turned out, was a qualified yes. What was most interesting, however, was the difference in the brain waves we saw when people were presented pictures of  brands they love and brands they either dislike or  feel ambivalent about. There was something going on here, and it was happening in two places. The first was happening very quickly, literally in the blink of an eye. We found our first gap right around 150 milliseconds – in just over 1/10th of a second. The second gap was a little later, at about 450 milliseconds, or about half a second.

Brands = Faces?

Previous ERP work often used faces as the visual stimuli that subjects were presented with. Researchers like working with faces because the human brain is so well attuned to responding to faces. As a stimuli, they provide plenty of signal with little noise. What researchers found is that there were significant differences in how our brains processes well known faces and unknown faces. They also found differences in how we processed smiling faces and scowling faces. And the differences in processing showed up in two places, one in the 150 millisecond range and the second at about 300 – 500 milliseconds. The first gap is what neurologists call the Vertex Positive Potential. The second is called the P300. I’ll explain what each of these means in more depth in a second.

What was interesting with this study is that we were seeing the same  thing play out when we substituted familiar brands for familiar faces. Respondents were responding to brands they liked the same way they would respond to a friendly face they recognized. So, what’s the big deal about that? And why two gaps? What was the significance of the 300 milliseconds that separate the two? Well, it’s the difference between gut instinct and rational thought. What we might have been seeing, as we stared at the projector screen, was two very different parts of the brain processing the same thought, with the first setting up the second.

The Quick Loop and the Slow Loop

Neurologists, including Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio, have found that as we live our lives, our brains can respond to certain people, things and situations in two different ways.

The first is the quick and dirty loop. This expressway in our brain literally rips through the ancient, more primal part of our brain – what has popularly been called the Lizard brain (neurologists and psychologists hate this term, by the way). Why? Because if we hesitate in dangerous situations, we’re dead. So, we have a hair trigger response mechanism that alerts us to danger in a blink of an eye. How quick is this response? Well, coincidentally, it’s usually measured in the 100 to 200 millisecond range. This is the VPP, the Vertex Positive Potential. It’s an emotional processing of a stimulus, an immediate assessment of threat or reward.

Previous research (Jeffreys Takumachi 1992) found that the VPP is common when we see faces but could also be found when we looked at some objects.  Some, but not all objects. What we (and by we, I mean Isabel and Dr. Liotti) did was substitute preferred and non-preferred brands for faces. And we saw the same VPP gap. Typically, this early processing is done by the amygdala (our danger detection module) and other areas of the brain including the orbitofrontal cortex.  If you look at the map of neural activity, you’ll find more frontal activity in the “Buy” group. The brain is responding emotionally to what it is seeing and it’s doing so almost instantaneously, in the blink of an eye.

Slide17

But then there’s a slower loop that feeds the signal up to our prefrontal cortex, where there’s a more deliberate processing of the signal. If the signal turns out to be non threatening, the brain damps down the alarms and returns the brain to it’s pre-alert status. Cooler heads prevail, quite literally. The time for this more circuitous path? About half a second, give or take a few milliseconds. This more deliberate evaluation represents the second gap, the P300 gap, we saw in our averaged brain waves. This is a more deliberate evaluation of the stimulus. It’s here where our reasoning brains kick in and either contradict or reinforce the early signals of the VPP gap. If it’s a smiling face, we go beyond instant recognition and start to retrieve (from memory) our concept of the person behind the face. The same is true, I suspect, for our favorite brands. The neural map here shows the difference in scalp potential activity between the “Buy” group and the “Non-Buy” group. The heat we see is the home of brand love.

Slide19

Where Brand Love Lives

In neurological research, different methods deliver different insights. The ERP methodology we used provides accurate timing, thus the discovery of the 150 and 450 ms gaps. But fMRI scanning provides accurate tracking of the exact locations of neural activity. Another study, conducted in 2004, starts to give us some clues as to exactly where brand love lives. Dr. Read Montague and a team at Baylor University staged a rather elaborate repeat of the Coke-Pepsi Challenge, but this time, people took the challenge while they were in a fMRI scanner. I’ve written before about the study if you’re interested in more detail about how they pulled it off.  Today, what I want to talk about is where in the brain brand love lives.

Coke is one of the most beloved brands in the world. It elicits strong loyalty amongst its fans, to the point where they swear it tastes much better than it’s rival – Pepsi. Well, as Montague found, if they didn’t know what they’re drinking, this isn’t really true. Even the most fervent Coke fan often choose Pepsi as their preferred drink when they didn’t know what they were drinking. But when they knew the brand they were tasting, something very interesting happened. Suddenly, other parts of the Coke fan’s brain started lighting up.

cokestudy

The hippocampus, the left parahippocampal cortex, the midbrain and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex started lighting up. This is significant because it indicates that the brain was actually retrieving concepts and beliefs from memory (the hippocampal activity) and the retrieved concepts were being integrated into feelings of reward (the prefrontal cortical activity). The brain was enhancing the physical sensation of taste with the full strength of brand love.

So?

Perhaps we’re starting to see not only the home of brand love, but also the timing. This was why I fixated on that small gap between the squiggly lines at 150 milliseconds. It’s because this represented our immediate, visceral response to brands. Before the brain really kicks in at all, we are already passing judgement on brands. And this judgement will color everything that comes after it. It sets the stage for our subsequent brand evaluations, happening at the 450 ms gap. This is when the brain structures identified in the Baylor study start to kick in and reinforce that “blink of an eye” first impression. Brands appear to deliver a one-two punch.

We’re currently planning our follow up research for 2010. I’m not exactly sure what it will entail, but you can bet we’ll be looking much closer at those 150 and 450 ms gaps!

Everyone’s a Critic: The Splinters of our Discontent

First published January 14, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I had a bout of inbox convergence today. Just as I was speculating what this week’s Search Insider might cover, two separate emails surrounded a juicy little topic and delivered it to me on a platter. First, a post from Ad Age about how marketers are reluctant to use online conversations as a source of customer feedback: “‘Listening’ ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age’s biggest gifts to marketers — the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion — as more of an added expense item than a blessing.”

And then, a small blog post on Echouser got me thinking: “It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like… Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day?”

Customers are Talking…

There’s been a lot of talk about the shift of control to the consumer and empowerment. As 2009 drew to a close, I talked about the shape of marketing to come. One of the key foundations I identified was participation — actively engaging in an ongoing conversation with customers. The two posts in my inbox start to get at the potential of this conversation.

In the first post, ARF laments advertisers’ reluctance to tap into ongoing online conversations as a source of customer feedback. Valid point, but I can understand their reluctance. This is unstructured content, making it qualitative, anecdotal and messy. Marketers balk at the heavy lifting required to mine and measure the collective mood. Some tools, such as Collective Intellect, are starting to take on the hard task of migrating online sentiment into a dashboard for marketers. The easier it gets, the more likely it will be for marketers to actually do it. Until then, we’re stuck with consumer surveys and comment cards.

…Anytime, Anywhere…

But it’s the second post that really got me thinking. Always-on connections have already given a voice to consumers, one that’s heard loud and clear. But what if we did indeed have a convenient and commonly structured way to provide feedback on every single interaction in our lives through mobile connections? What if marketers could know in real time what every single customer thought of them, based on the experience he or she just had? Some cringe at the thought. Others are eager for it. The second group will inevitably prevail.

Given the level of investment required on the part of the user, I suspect this channel would only be used in extremely negative and extremely positive circumstances. We don’t tend to take the time to comment on things that come reasonably close to meeting our expectations. But even so, it’s a powerful feedback channel to contemplate, giving the truly user-centric company everything they could ever wish for.

…So Listen!

Last week, I talked about the mother lode of consumer intent that exists in search query logs and how we’ve been slow to leverage it. This week, we have an equally valuable asset rapidly coming down the pipe — a real-time view of our customers’ sentiment.  That’s a one-two punch that could knock the competition out cold.

What I Took Away from the Search Insider Summit

First published December 10, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve had a few days now to reflect on what came out of the Search Insider Summit in Park City. It was an interesting perspective: Avinash Kaushik telling us that the majority of search marketing “sucks”; Mark Mahaney prophesizing that search is poised for a big climb in 2010; Rob Griffin warning us the entire industry is going through the throes of change; Chris Copeland showing us that social media is inextricably linked with search activity; and Mike Moran cautioning us that CEOs and CFOs worship at one altar and one altar only: profit. If we want to sell search, we have to speak that language.

Adding to this, I climbed on my usual soapbox, arguing that we spend too much time with data and too little time with our customers. In the panel exploring how to balance qualitative and quantitative approaches, the panelists were asked how they differentiated the two. For me, the answer is this: Quantitative is watching the dashboard while you drive. Qualitative is looking out the windshield.

SEM’s Call to Arms

So, when you mash this up over 3 days and distill the essence, what do you end up with? I think SEMs heard a distinct call to “up their game” last week in Park City. Sure, there are tough problems to tackle. Marketers are demanding more from their budgets than ever before. As Avinash said, attribution causes many marketers to “cry like little girls.” Determining user intent and matching it in our ads is tough. Matching it on the landing page and beyond is even tougher. Trying to wrap our heads around the shifting tide of social media gives us all a migraine. And if our jobs weren’t tough enough, Google just gave SEO a slap upside the head last week with personalization of all search results. Thank God the bar was open after the sessions wrapped up.

But we search marketers are a resilient bunch. The people roaming the hallways of the Chateaux at Silver Lake didn’t look morose. In fact, they were almost giddily optimistic. There was a sense that as rough as the ride was in this boat we all chose to set sail in, at least it was heading in the right direction. Rob Griffin put it this way: “If you’re any good, you might not have the same job title or be doing the same thing in a few years, but you’ll be employed. That’s more than a lot of other people will be able to say.”

I’m Not Sure Where We’re Going, but Follow Me!

I look at it this way. The market has already shifted. And where the market goes, we marketers have to follow. Somebody has to figure this stuff out. And, as I remarked to someone over drinks after the sessions wound down, I’m constantly amazed by the number of people in marketing who have impressive titles on their business cards but simply don’t get the magnitude of the behavioral shift we’re in the middle of. Avinash is right. A lot of what I see in the digital marketing landscape “sucks.” We have to get better. We have to get smarter. We have to do a better job of listening to the people we’re trying to market to.

I know we will get better. Really, do we have a choice? And the advantage search marketers have is that we have chosen to work in the one area of online that has been an unqualified success. Everyone is looking to us as an example of digital marketing done right. And we’re looking at each other saying, “Okay, that worked. Now, what’s next?”

Marketers: Shift Your Paradigms

First published December 3, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to shift paradigms.

Now that I’m older and arguably wiser, people sometimes ask me for that “one piece of advice.” Usually, it involves stepping into someone else’s perspective and seeing things from their viewpoint. With each year that passes, I find myself doing that more and more, leading me to dole out that piece of advice more frequently.

You see, there is no truth or ultimate reality. There is only our perception of it. We have a lens we see the world through.  And everyone else has his or her own lens.  Paradigm shifts happen when we suddenly see reality through another lens, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to try to understand what another person’s view of reality looks like.

In one of his books, Stephen Covey tells a story of a ride home in a New York subway. In the same car was a father with his two children. The children were running wild through the car, jumping on seats, jostling other passengers and fighting with each other. The father sat oblivious to the actions of his children, staring straight into space.

Suddenly, Covey could take it no longer. Someone had to rein these children in and the father didn’t seem to be doing anything. The reality through Covey’s lens was that the father’s obvious lack of parental discipline had resulted in two rude, ill-mannered children. Finally, he could take it no longer. He moved over to the father and said, “Your children seem a little rambunctious.” The father looked at the children, then, turned to Covey, “I guess they are. I’m sorry. We just came from the hospital. Their mother passed away this morning.”  Needless to say, Covey’s paradigm shifted in an instant.

The Paradigm of the Marketer

Most of the problems I see in marketing result from the fact that marketers see the world one way and their prospects see the world another way.  We have two different paradigms. And marketers have a difficult time putting their lens away long enough to try the view through their prospect’s lens.

About a year ago, at the Search Insider Summit (I’m actually at it again as I write this) I saw this clearly in a session on mobile advertising strategies. From the audience, which was made up entirely of marketers, there was frustration that the carriers wouldn’t allow targeting of mobile users through their account information. “You have all the information, why don’t you allow us to use it to target our messages?” was the cry from more than one frustrated marketer. I asked for a show of hands of all who thought, as marketers, that this would be a good move on the part of the mobile providers. Every hand shot up.

“Okay, as mobile users, who still wants to have ads targeted to you by your personal information.” Several hands suddenly wavered, hit by the force of shifting paradigms. Many went down. Others dipped noticeably as their owners realized their own hypocrisy. Suddenly, they were seeing the world as a customer, not as a marketer.

Analyzing campaign data and crunching numbers is not the way to shift a paradigm. Our personal lenses are stubborn things. It’s very difficult to swap them for another.  The best way carries the fancy title “ethnography” but it simply means “writing about people”. Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, seeks to understand people by observing them “where they live”, in the full context of their lives. In this setting, one gets further removed from your reality and more embedded in theirs, making paradigm shifts easier. I don’t think we, as marketers, spend enough time in the lives of our customers. And unfortunately, the Internet and the flood of data available is only making the problem worse.

The Survey Says…

Here’s my last analogy. I’m a huge “West Wing fan,” and I recently watched an episode from season two where President Bartlet’s staff was polling five red states on their attitudes towards gun control.  Not surprisingly, the percentage approving came up short of expectations. Josh Lyman, a White House staffer, was disappointed and frustrated.  “That’s it!” he said, “We have to dial down our gun control rhetoric.”

The pollster, played by Marlee Matlin, responded, “I think you have to dial it up.”

“That’s not what the data says,” Josh said.

“How do you know what the data says?” said the pollster. “The data says whatever you want it to. It depends on how you ask the question, what they had for breakfast and whether a gun control lobbyist pissed them off yesterday.”

Data tends to reinforce paradigms, not shift them. It’s the understanding that comes from personal contact that shifts paradigm. It’s sitting beside an apparently delinquent father and learning that he just lost his spouse.

A Great Question: Why Don’t Big Companies “Get It?”

At our event in the Bay area last week, Marketo Marketing Director Jon Miller gave a very compelling presentation about how they’ve put a comprehensive sales and marketing strategy together that not only blows away performance benchmarks in his category, but outstrips what would be considered “Best of Breed” campaigns. At the same event, someone from a huge company asked who were the companies that were “doing it right” in B2B. A panel of very smart B2B marketers looked at each other, struggling to come up with a single name. Finally, Jon said “Well, I think we’re doing it pretty well.” It might have sounded boastful, but Jon had the numbers to back up his claim.

I’ve thought about that a lot in the few days since. Why can a small company like Marketo put together a digital campaign that integrates all the right pieces and gets them to click while a Fortune 500, with all their resources available, can’t?  Why are smaller companies much more likely to “Get It”, with a big G?

“Getting it with a Big G”

First, I should explain what I mean by Big G “Getting It.” When I look at the most successful marketers in the digital ecosystem, they have a unique ability to position themselves at exactly the right place on the digital adoption curve. They can read where their markets are going and seem to be there at the right time with the right offering. They offer something so compelling that adoption is a no brainer. These companies have a magical ability to combine the promise and advantages of game changing technology with a intuitive sense of what the market wants. Think Amazon, eBags, NetFlix & Zappos.

Hmmm..you say. No B2B companies in that mix? I would put Salesforce there, but after that, it gets difficult to think of B2B marketers who have found the sweet spot of the adoption curve. That’s why our panel was stumped when asked for examples of B2B companies that “Get It.”

I think the answer lies in the inherent nature of the companies that “Get It”. I suspect there are things that are natural here that it’s almost impossible for bigger companies to emulate. This follows up an earlier post about companies that seem to naturally benefit from SEO. As I thought more about it, I realized it comes down to a few common things:

Top Down, Bottom Up Buy In – Getting a company aligned and on the same page is just a whole lot easier when an executive meeting consists of leaning back in your chair and yelling across the hallway. There’s immediacy of communication and, through this, agreement, that’s intoxicating in a smaller company. If you get executive commitment to an initiative, the entire company can know about it and start executing in minutes if required.

Nimbleness –  With quicker communication comes nimbleness. Smaller companies move faster than big companies, and in the digital marketplace, that’s a vital advantage. If you get that rarest of animals, a small company with seasoned executives who have “been there, done that”, you get a tremendously effective execution machine: a company who knows what to do and can actually do it without dealing with energy sucking inertia.

Growing Up Digital – The handful of companies that I see have almost all grew up in a natively digital market. The online marketplace is baked right into their DNA. Another important point: they get technology, but they’re not star struck by it. If they’re chasing a social media strategy, it’s because they understand that it’s because conversations are happening and they need to be part of them, not because they’ve been caught up in the buzz and hyperbole of it.

It’s Not Marketing, It’s How We Roll – The idea of marketing as a separate department or discipline seems to belong to a past generation. In the successful new breed of companies that “Get It”, marketing best practices are so deeply woven into the fabric of the company that it’s impossible to separate them from all the other stuff the company does. They just do the things that are right for the customer, and everything good seems to naturally flow from that. If you want to call it marketing, fine, but it’s not the first label they’d put on it. They tend to use words like “culture” and “core values.”

Living Closer to the Customer – This ingrained ability to anticipate customer needs comes from living closer to the customer.  There is very little distance between everyone in the company and all their customers in smaller businesses. The CEO knows and understands at a gut level what the customer wants from them. And, if you have an executive that knows how to execute (rarer than you might think) you’ve got consistently happier customers.

Those are my observations after a few days thought, but this question of why smaller, newer companies seem better positioned to evolve in the new marketplace is one that needs more thought. If you could take a few minutes to share any examples of companies that you think embody these characteristics, I’d be grateful. Just add a comment to the blog and I’ll start compiling a list of examples to both share and to take a closer look at.