The useless jury

Whether we acknowledge it or not, much of the time many of us are playing to one or more juries.

I’m not talking about a literal jury–or even one of those goofy panels HLN puts together for sensational legal cases.

I’m talking about those sometimes nameless and faceless people that we consciously or unconsciously allow to drive our attitudes and behaviors.

We not only believe that there are these groups of people who are out there constantly judging us, but we take action to seek their approval, to get them to agree with us, to persuade them to buy whatever it is we are selling. To try to make them like us.

There are useful juries of course. Hopefully we all have friends, confidants or other members of our tribe whose input is trusted and valuable. They help us sharpen our message and fine-tune our product or service. They give us confidence to walk through our fear.

The customers we have or want are useful juries as well. Ultimately if they aren’t voting on behalf of our value proposition it matters a lot. And we have the choice to adjust our strategy and try to win them back, or move on to something new.

The useless jury, however, is the most pernicious.

Sometimes they take the form of the relentless defender of the status quo. They are filled with fear and hate most change, particularly if it might somehow reflect badly on them.

Sometimes they are the folks that aren’t engaged enough with your project to fully understand what it is about and who it is for–and you are powerless to change that. If they aren’t willing to do the work, they don’t get a vote.

Mostly, though, the juries that bring us down–that keep us stuck–are those whose judgment is irrelevant, yet somehow we feel compelled to listen.

When, as Seth reminds us, you choose your customer first then you can be emboldened to say and accept that “this is not for you.”  And if it’s not for them, why does their opinion matter, why do you have to listen, why let them hold you back?

It’s time to dismiss all the useless juries in your life.

 

 

When the vehicle becomes the destination

If you read most marketing magazines, attend a typical industry conference or listen to professional service firms pitching their latest offering you hear mostly about tactics and techniques.

Whether we’re talking about social media, mobile apps, big data analytics, cross-channel integration–or whatever the buzz-phrase of the moment happens to be–there is a tendency to glom on to how something works and whether whatever is being sold can deliver ROI as a stand-alone investment.

Yet the reality is that your journey toward impactful customer-centricity, toward being truly channel agnostic, and ultimately delivering on the promise of a frictionless customer experience, isn’t merely about picking the right individual component pieces that move you closer to your vision.

This is not to say that individual investment decisions aren’t important or that one should completely ignore ROI calculations.

But the remarkable brands of tomorrow are likely to be run by leaders who understand where they need to get to and are committed to work through the ways to get there. They realize that their brand is an eco-system and creating it requires ruthless experimentation, making some bold investments, driving a culture that puts the customer first and aligning the organization and metrics against that end vision.

In an ever-changing and fast-moving world the vehicles we choose are likely to come and go.  When we hold too tightly to them we  risk losing sight of the destination.

Built for me (Part 3): The promiscuous shopper

You may know the old joke that ends: ”We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.” Now apply that in the retail context.

I introduced the notion of the promiscuous shopper nearly 3 years ago. This special, but hardly rare, breed of consumer is always on the hunt for the best deal and completely devoid of any potential to be loyal.

When you choose to anchor your marketing strategy on relentless un-targeted promotions, and then layer on extra coupons and rewards points, it’s the promiscuous shopper who is the first to bite, and who then spikes as a percentage of your business.

To be fair, most businesses need some of these consumers from time to time. There is clearance product to be sold and any sensible marketing and merchandising strategy will reflect a natural demand curve.

An unusually high level of discounting may also be necessary to drive initial trial, so long as you are confident that repeat business has the potential to be loyal and profitable.

And certainly promiscuous shoppers are not always immediately apparent. Time and solid analysis are needed to separate them out and start to chase them away.

But always bear this in mind: when the promiscuous shopper feels that your business is built for them, it’s the first sign of trouble. Big trouble.

Built for me (Part 2): Treat different customers differently

In my last post, I suggested that the most powerful brands elicit the feeling from their core customers that the business was designed around their unique needs and wants. That is was built for them.

This idea is a core tenet of strategic business model design. But it extends to tactical execution as well.

I’m hardly the first person to espouse the “treat different customers differently” mantra, but embracing it is essential to putting “built for me” into practice day in and day out.

Built for me can extend to how you deliver your customer experience. One size fits all approaches rarely yield superior customer service marks. When you don’t pay attention to–and act upon–my unique preferences, I’m less and less likely to return.

Know me, show me you know me and show me you value me.

Built for me should be a driving force behind just about any brands marketing strategy. More and more, mass promotion fails to move the dial or gives the illusion of prosperity when all you are doing is chasing sales with no potential to be profitable–or chasing customers with no potential for loyalty.

Leverage analytics and insight to deliver a progressively more personalized set of messages, offers and experiences.

There is no question that pursuing a built for me strategy introduces cost and complexity. But more and often than not, failure to embrace this path eventually leads to middling performance and consumers who are more than happy to take their business elsewhere.

 

Incongruous

Earlier this week I needed to call Apple support to get help with my iCloud account.  I was bounced to three different customer service folks over an hour or so before I finally got to Craig (who ultimately did a great job of handling my issues).

Most of the hour plus that I was on the phone I was on hold and had to listen to loud, tinny and static-filled bad 90′s music (I know that’s redundant).

I was struck by how incongruous this all was.  Apple stands for an easy customer experience, yet they could not manage to come close to being “one and done” in resolving my customer service issue.  Apple is the paragon of innovation, yet their hold music sound quality was an abomination.  Apple stands for hip and cool, yet their music offering was anything but.

Apple is hardly alone in delivering an incongruent brand experience.  As the distinctions blur between channels and touch-points, far too many brands still fail to create a seamlessly integrated experience regardless of how the customer chooses to engage and shop.

In a world of ever-expanding choices–where, increasingly, the consumer holds most of the power–your brand is only as good as your weakest link.

Incongruous may make you superfluous.

The multi-channel customer is your best customer. Duh.

This is the 3rd straight year that I’ve attended a National Retail Federation “Big Show” session and a senior retail executive takes the stage and proclaims that the multichannel–or “omni-channel” if you want to be trendy–customer spends more than a single channel customer.

In fact, they say–pausing to create a little extra anticipation as they prepare to bestow another morsel of massive insight–the more channels she shops in, the more she spends.

I then scan the crowd and notice dozens, maybe hundreds, of my fellow attendees furiously taking notes. I check the Twitter feed and there is a sudden burst of activity as these pearls of wisdom. Must. Be. Shared.

From where I sit, if you care about such things and this is actually news to you, it only proves on thing. You haven’t been paying attention. At all. Let’s hope the boss doesn’t find out.

The reality is that Sears and JC Penney were reporting that their multi-channel customers outspent single channel customer by 3 or 4X nearly a decade ago.

At Neiman Marcus we reported the same phenomenon in public statements in 2006 and 2007.  Lots of other brands have said essentially the same thing over the last several years. Look it up. I’ll wait.

So now that we know to be skeptical about how NRF selects its speakers–and you’re aware that you need to up your market research game–so what?

First of all, it might be better to state things this way: your best customer is a multi-channel customer. The distinction being that if someone is already a good customer they are more likely to start engaging with you in other forms (web, mobile, social, etc.). Understanding cause and effect, and segmenting your customers by pathway to profitability, is well worth the effort.

Second, stating facts about customer behavior isn’t a strategy. You aren’t going to win in an increasingly omni-channel (see how trendy I am!) world unless you fully embrace customer-centricity, are committed to treating different customers differently AND you have a clear idea of how each channel or touch-point delivers a remarkable customer experience.

So if you are just learning to appreciate the multi-channel customer and are thinking about an omni-channel initiative, I’d get started.

And I’d hurry. It’s later than you think.

 

My Top Ten Blog Posts of 2012

Happy New Year.

And now, as has become my custom, here are my top ten posts of the past year. Enjoy. Comment. Debate. Share.

1.   The world’s best loyalty program.

2.  The end of e-commerce.

3.  JCPenney’s Road to Recovery (Part 2): The intervention.

4.  JCPenney swings for the fences (Part 1).

5.  JCPenney’s Road to Recovery (Part 1): The reality distortion field.

6.  JCPenney’s Road to Recovery (Part 3): The 10 point action plan.

7.  In gut we trust.

8.  Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.

9.  Honey, I shrunk the store.

10. 8 things that are wrong with your omni-channel strategy.

And one of my personal favorites that, in my humble opinion, was mostly overlooked: Knowing what ‘yes’ looks like.

But it did get excerpted in Seth Godin’s new book The Icarus Deception.  So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

The shopper genome project

No doubt you’ve heard of The Human Genome Project–the effort to decode our species by identifying and mapping all of our genes. Ultimately it’s an effort to better understand what makes us tick, from both a functional and physical standpoint.

As a business or brand leader you have a similar challenge when it comes to decoding your current and potential consumers’ attitudes, needs and behaviors.

In a world of vast and growing choices, the pressure is only increasing to develop deep, actionable insight into your customer base.

In a world where most segments are growing slowly, your only chance for out-sized growth is to gain market share. And that requires understanding which levers to pull that are compelling enough to win new clients or grow share of wallet with existing ones.

In a world where most competitors are either engaged in a race to the bottom or stuck in tired old mass marketing techniques, you have the chance to win big by embracing a “treat different customers differently” strategy. But you need to understand how to meaningfully segment your customer base and exactly which value propositions to deliver to which segments. And you need to get into action.

In a world where smart devices are growing like crazy and (finally!) offer the promise of the right offer to the right customer at the right time, you had better be able to follow consumers as they channel hop and to deliver permission-based, highly relevant and personalized communications.

More than a decade ago Don Peppers and Martha Rodgers opined that the only true lasting competitive advantage is to know more about your customers than the competition–and to be willing to act on that insight.

That’s never been more true than right now.

 

Pick a lane

Funny how often it seems like keeping your options open seems like the least risky strategy.

The job seeker crafts an “I can do anything” resume designed to make her appealing to the widest range of potential employers.

A brand launches a low price guarantee, while still claiming to embrace a strategy focused on service and differentiation.

A retail CEO attempting a bold turn-around talks about making his brand more distinctive and relevant while also striving to become “everybody’s favorite store.”

Sometime you can have your cake and eat it too. Spiritually, the middle way can be the path to enlightenment. Black and white thinking can often get you into trouble.

But in a world of overwhelming data, endless choices and a sea of sameness, you had better choose. And choose wisely.

It’s far more risky to engage in the race to the bottom if you aren’t committed to being THE low-cost provider.

It’s far more risky to try to be a little of everything to everybody than something powerfully compelling and remarkably relevant to a tightly defined set of consumers.

We are all familiar with the driver who straddles the line, failing to commit to a lane.

But that’s just annoying.

For businesses, it’s death in the middle.

Pick a lane.

And then step on the gas.

 

 

 

Big data, little action

You’re probably hearing a lot about so-called “Big Data” and “Big Data Analytics.”

Here’s one definition I like: “Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information.”

More and more, companies will start to discover that–unless they can win on price–their only hope for carving out a sustainable advantage is to become more intensely customer relevant than the competition. Making sense of the ever-growing pile of consumer data–transactional, web browsing, social media activity and the like–can be incredibly powerful. There is no question that innovative technology and new techniques are emerging that will transform brands’ abilities to glean powerful insight.

But…

But the reality is that for many companies the problem is not a paucity of data or an inability to extract nuggets of potentially interesting findings. Data is not insight. Insight is not action.

Many of the companies I have worked for have a ton of data, but not an ounce of capability nor willingness to act upon it.

If you don’t have a well articulated customer growth strategy, if you don’t have people who know how to turn data into actionable tactics, if you don’t have leadership committed to customer-centricity and being channel agnostic, more data is not going to help.

First things first.