Category Archives: Customer Relationships

It’s Not about Control – It’s About Connections!

Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Buzz Metrics wrote an interesting column this week talking about the fact that CMO’s still have control.  He railed against the absolution of responsibility on the part of marketers, using the new buzzwords of consumer empowerment to justify the fact that they can throw more spam at the average user now because, after all, the user is in control.

“First, the overheated rhetoric acts as a deceptive rationalization. Remember the theory of cognitive dissonance, that testy tension emanating from two conflicting thoughts at the same time. I worry all this talk about consumers being in control relieves dissonance. It allows us to absolve ourselves of treating consumers with respect. Hey, if they have control and, hence, the power, what possible harm could our junk mail, spam intrusiveness, and recklessness do?”

Pete touches on a very interesting point that I’ve talked about in the number of columns and post before.  It’s the idea of brand messaging going beyond the carefully manufactured advertising and marketing channels and being baked right into the DNA of the company.  Now, brand messaging is as much about customer experience and customer service as it is about the message we see in the typical 30 second television spot.  It brings up an interesting question about consumer control.  Is it so much about control as it is about the ability to connect with information in a new way?  As Pete rightly points out, marketers still have control over a number of aspects of the relationship.  It’s impossible to have a two-way relationship with one side being in total control.  The fact is that consumers control part of that relationship and marketers control part of that relationship.  The success of the relationship lies in the ability for the two sides to connect in a mutually beneficial way.  It’s not so much the consumers have taken control from marketers as it is that what was typically much more a one-way relationship has evolved into a two-way relationship.

“At the end of the day, we still control the message and the business processes that shape it, but we may need an alterative path to get there. Product quality, customer service, accurate claims, and employee empowerment are all within our control. And these are the input types that really matter, and always have.”

Let’s explore a little bit closer how this has happened.  It really comes down to the number of channels available for messaging to get from the marketer to the consumer.  It used to be that those channels were tightly controlled and there were only a handful of them.  It goes back to the idea of power constructs.  The last hundred years our society has been all about power constructs.  The paths that lead from the manufacturing of products to the consumption of the products were few and were controlled by the powerful.  This was true in virtually any market you could think of.  With consumer packaged goods the ability of those goods to flow from the manufacturer to the consumer is controlled at various points along that channel by a few powerbrokers.  The same has been true in advertising.  The paths from the advertiser to the consumer were generally controlled by a few very powerful corporations.  Look at how the power construct in advertising typically played itself out:

  • At the top we have the advertiser.
  • Below that we have the advertising agency that was responsible for crafting the message.
  • Next you have the media buyer that takes a message created by the advertising agency and determines the channels to reach the target consumer.
  • Below that you have the channels used to reach the consumer, whether they be broadcast TV, newspaper, magazine or radio stations.
  • Finally, at the bottom, you have the consumer themselves.

All the communication in this channel went one way, from the advertiser down through each of the successive layers until it reached the consumer.  There was no corresponding channel to allow communication from the consumer to flow back through all these gates to the advertiser.  In the case where an advertiser did want to get information from an individual consumer, they would employ a market research company to circumvent the entire power structure of communication and go directly to a handful of representative consumers, determine what they were thinking and report back to the advertiser (or perhaps the advertising agency).  Picture a series of locks on a canal, with all the water flowing one way and with each of the gates of the individual locks designed to let water out and not let water back in.  The only way for water to run back was a small pipeline with a pump on it and the switch to that pump was always in the hands of the advertiser.  They chose when they wanted to listen to the consumer and when they chose to ignore the consumer.  The consumer had virtually no power to push their message back to the advertiser.

Now let’s look at what the Internet did.  The Internet took a highly structured, albeit one way, channel and completely blew it apart.  Now water flows freely back and forth between the advertiser and the consumer.  This not so much took control way from the advertiser and gave it to the consumer as it eliminated (or is in the process of eliminating) the existing structure that information flows through.  It democratized connections.  Rather than a man-made channel with restrictive gates and locks that restrict the flow of information from one place to the other, the Internet has turned the landscape into a vast field during a rainstorm.  Water collects in a thousand tiny pools and flows according to the online landscape.  Advertisers can influence where those flows happened as much as consumers can.  The control of flow is now jointly owned by everyone.  Advertisers have not had their power taken away.  They just have to learn how to share it.  They have to live up to the responsibility that goes with a truly two-way relationship.  Because they can no longer control the channel the message goes through, they have to spend more time controlling the very message itself.  They have to make it bulletproof, capable of withstanding the BS test.  And you have to understand that that message can’t be carefully crafted, it has to be lived.  It encompasses everything they do in the day-to-day operation of their business.  It has to include all the touch points that brand has with the outside world.  Because every touch point is a small puddle in that massive field.  If they manage the information correctly it will flow in the desired direction.  If they abdicate their responsibility of meeting the customer halfway in providing a mutually beneficial proposition, then they have to bear the consequences when the flow goes in the direction they don’t want it to.  And if there is enough momentum in the opposite direction, they will get flooded by a tidal wave of consumer dissent.

All in all, it’s a healthier relationship.  One-way relationships tend not to be sustainable in the long term.  But as with any power shift, there’s a pendulum effect that will likely occur here.  As power finds its natural balancing point, it will likely swing too far in the direction of the consumers before it comes back again.

User-centricity is More than Just a Word

Ever since Time Magazine made you and I the person of the year, user experience has been the two words on the tip of everyone’s tongue. We’re all saying that the user is king and that we’re building everything around them. But I fear that user-centricity is quickly becoming one of those corporate clichés that’s easy to say, but much, much harder to do. All too often I see internal fighting in a lot of companies between those that truly get user centricity and have become the internal user champions and those that are continuing to push the corporate agenda, at the expense of the user experience. The tough part of user centricity is seeing things through the users eyes. We can do user testing but if we truly put the user first, it requires tremendous courage and fortitude to make the user the primary stakeholder. All too often, I see user considerations being one of several factors that are being balanced in the overall design. And often, it takes a backseat to other considerations, such as monetization. This is the trap that Yahoo currently finds themselves in. They talk about user experience all the time. But the fact is, over the last two years it’s really been the advertiser whose’s owned their search results page. I’ve recently seen signs of the balance tipping more towards the user’s favor with the rollout of Panama and a more judicious presentation of top sponsored ads. But I’m still not sure the user is winning the battle at Yahoo!

It’s not easy to step inside your user’s head when it comes to designing interfaces. It’s very tought to toggle the user perspective on and off when you’re going through a design cycle. The feedback we get from usability testing tends to be too far removed from the actual implementation of the design. By that time the meat of the findings has been watered down and diluted to the point where the user’s voice is barely heard. That’s why I like personas as a design vehicle. A well formulated persona keeps you on track. It keeps you in the mindset of the user. It gives you a mental framework you can step into quickly and readjust your perspective to that of the user, not the designer.

If you’re truly going to be user centric, be prepared to take a lot of flack from a lot of people. This is not a promise to be made lightly. You have to commit to it and not let anything dissuade you from delivering the best possible end-user experience, defined in the user’s own terms. This can’t be a corporate feel good thing. It has to be a corporate commitment that requires balls the size of Texas. And if you’re going to make a commitment, you better be damn sure that the entire company is also willing to make the same commitment. The user experience group can’t be a lone bastion for the user, fighting a huge sea of corporate momentum going in the opposite direction. This isn’t about balancing the user in the grand scheme of things, it’s about committing wholeheartedly to them and getting everyone else in the organization to make the same commitment. If you can do so, I think the potential wins are huge. There’s a lot of people talking about user centricity but there’s not a lot of people delivering on it consistently and wholeheartedly.

Getting the Brand Point Across, One Touch Point at a Time

First published February 8, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

One of the great ironies of marketing is that we’re in the communication business, but many of us aren’t that good at it. And I’m not talking about broadcasting to a million people, I’m talking one-to-one, get-your-point-across communication. We tend to hide our real meaning under reams of spun language, taking the core of the message and wrapping it in the cotton batting of “marketspeak.”

We’ve come to believe that to make a brand message successful, you have to create mental pictures that tie the brand to vague and hopefully attractive emotions. But when it comes down to saying why you should buy something, in a way that hits home with a consumer who’s ready to buy, we’re at a loss for words.

Talking the Talk, Not Walking the Walk

Evidence of this was so painfully and clearly pointed out in a recent study by the Louws Management Corporation, where 80% of 711 advertising and marketing professionals surveyed said they are strongly aware of their company’s brand positioning, but only one fourth of them “can clearly articulate (their) company’s brand position to… clients, customers or prospective clients.”

Perhaps those of us in search have a unique perspective on this. After all, there’s not a lot of room in the few dozen words typically found in a search listing to expound on the warm fuzzies. You’d better get the point across, and fast, because the typical searcher is only going to “engage” with your listing for a few seconds at best before exercising his control and clicking through to your site, or not. You become a marketer of few words, nailing the “hot buttons” quickly and precisely. In fact, we’ve gone too far the other way, convinced that everyone who is searching is also buying immediately, an assumption that’s at least 85% wrong, according to past research we’ve done.

Brand = Experience

But I think there’s something more fundamental and troubling in these survey results. Jakob Nielsen once said that on the Web, branding is much more about experience than exposure. This is true to a profound level that escapes many marketers. In the new world of empowered buyers, they engage with a brand at a thousand different touch points, and every one of those touch points builds a brand “mosaic” — an image of the brand that the buyers participate in building because the Web has empowered them to do so.  Every single member of the company that consumers connect with also helps build this collective brand picture.

And that’s why the findings of this study are so deeply troubling. If 75% of the people who are the marketing stewards of the brand message can’t express it in simple language, what hope is there for the customer service person, in a contracted call center, who, for one customer at one particular point of time, is the entire brand? In this new reality, where brand is built on the front lines, through real contact with real customers, rather than in carefully controlled messaging that comes through a handful of advertising channels, crystal-clear communication within an organization becomes an imperative.

Cult-Like Marketing

In this new definition of marketing, cult-like cultures, an obsessive focus on corporate purpose and company-wide alignment are the prerequisites for success. Brand messaging has to be more than marketspeak, it has to be a mantra, the cornerstone of a strategy that is communicated to every member of the company repeatedly, clearly and fervently. It has to be a concept so crystal clear, so absolutely unambiguous, that there can be no questioning what it means. Every single member of the company has to have it on the tip of their tongue – and, infinitely more important, embedded deep within their beliefs. That’s the only way it can be consistently spread through the thousands and millions of interactions and conversations that make up the new brand mosaic.

Digital Voyeurism: The New Reality

I remember the first time I went to my local gym and saw a new sign, hastily hand drawn and posted, announcing that cell phones were no longer allowed in the change rooms. It took me a minute or two to get it, but I finally figured it out. Ahh..they come with cameras now.

There are two dimensions to this that I wanted to briefly explore. First of all, with digital cameras everywhere, businesses have to be more careful about the face they show to the public, because it’s likely that if their bad side is showing, there’ll be someone there to snap a picture. Consider the example of one Kohl’s store in Dallas.

kohls5_2A shopper visited the store in the post Christmas season, found a store that looked like a tornado just ripped through it and just happened to have a cell phone with a camera and a fairly well read blog. It gets worse. His post happened to catch the eye of Seth Godin, who has one of the most read blogs on the Web. The result? A PR nightmare for Kohl’s. And this can happen anywhere. The next time a character at Disneyworld alledgedly sucker punches a guest, you can count on a camera being nearby. It’s enough to make your average PR Director retire to a remote Caribbean isle, one without internet connections.

The second implication has to do with personal privacy. If there are pictures snapped of us, and they get posted to the web without our knowing, or our permission, what will the fall out be? They’re there for the whole world to see, through any one of a number of image search engines. Fellow SearchInsider David Berkowitz explores that in his column today:

“The overarching issue, the one that’s most likely to keep me up at night, is, “Do we have to entirely relinquish our right to privacy?” If the answer is yes, then it simplifies the issue. We press forward with every technological innovation, privacy be damned. We accept that everything we say can be recorded, and it’s not just to improve customer service.”

Smile..you’re on Candid Camera!