Making a hash of customer dialog

I just saw a story in MediaPost this morning about how McDonalds optimistically introduced a twitter hashtag (#McDstories) and invited its customers to talk about how wonderful their McD experiences were.  As the story points out, they should not have been surprised that there were some very unpleasant stories posted, mainly having to do with incidents of food poisoning.  In fact, you should avoid reading the tweets close to mealtime.


I suppose there are two possible lessons from this cautionary tale.  One, of course, is don't do that.  Don't hand your brand over to your customers and assume that they will be kind to it.  Other people do not love your brand like you do.  To you, it is a precious child.  However, to at least some your customers, the brand will seem an uncaring behemoth that has royally messed up.

The second lesson, though, is more optimistic.  If you want to engage with your customers about your brand, do it in a true dialog.  That means engaging people in settings where you can have a real conversation, answering their complaints and concerns responsibly, with a human voice. Twitter, as we have just seen, is a street-corner soap box where the loudest, grossest, or funniest voice is amplified at the touch of a button.  Other settings (your own branded community, or even Facebook) offer you a much more confined space and greater opportunity for conversation.

The bottom line? It makes sense to listen to your customers' gripes; after all, they will be sharing these stories with others, even if you don't hand them the megaphone.  Just do it in a setting where you can provide real help, correct misunderstandings, and nurture relationships. 

Be careful what you know: 3 techniques for keeping an open mind

Two stories came across my social media screens today:  one from Pew on how what you "know" about budget deficits is influenced by your political affiliation, and another from Time on how the myth of the independence-seeking male and the marriage-seeking female is a.... myth.  It just goes to show that you should be very careful about what you know.

I am fascinated by what it takes to think creatively, and the most important tool is a knack for keeping your mind open.  It turns out that your frontal lobe is better at openness, and your temporal lobe is better at closing off debate.  Well, if this is a contest that takes place in your brain, then you can be the referee.  

Much of the time it makes sense to learn from experience and apply existing patterns to new problems.  If we didn't listen to the temporal lobe, we'd never have moved on from the invention of fire, because we'd have to keep inventing it over and over again.  However it doesn't always make sense--if it did we'd never have moved from open pit fires to gas heat.  

In other words, you need to re-examine the world from time to time and come up with new ideas, or you're just as stuck as the person who doesn't learn from experience.  For example, when you look at competition do you consider that you are competing for people's time and attention, not just the dollars they spend in your brand's category?  Not that you should think of a dad's kids as your competitors, but you should be realistic about the need for a father to turn off the computer or the TV and spend time playing outside on a Saturday afternoon.

Here are three ways you can help to keep your mind open when your watch is telling you to just make a decision and move on:

1)  Make a Customer Your Colleague.  Look at life through the eyes of a customer.  Pick any customer and imagine what their day is like.  Don't try to jam your imagination into the purchasing lifecycle, just spend a good hour or two empathizing with what's important to them.  Sketch out how they move through a good day, then a bad day.  Map out all of the choices they have to make; the joys and frustrations they might experience.  Give your hypothetical customer a name and keep him or her with you as you strategize.  What would your customer tell you about the problems you're facing in your business?

2) Dream up Scary New Competitors.  Imagine that some entrepreneur was going to come out of nowhere and completely change your category.  What might they do?  This one is fun to do with colleagues.  Draw a map of all of the industries that touch your marketplace; where might the new competition come from, and what might it look like?  Again, don't leap to any conclusions; keep going until your scenarios are completely ridiculous.  (Probably you don't have to worry about competition from alien superbeings; Mark Zuckerbergs don't come along every day.  Phew.)

3) Clear Your Mental Desk.   This one is different; it's a mental exercise that you can bring not only into your work life but also your daily life.  Most of the time, the reason we don't think we have any time to dream up new ideas is that our mind is cluttered up with deadlines, conflicts, and inner turmoil of various kinds.  That puts you in survival mode and your temporal lobe in charge.  How hard would it really be to clear out even fifteen minutes where you turned to a blank wall and just let your imagination fill it?  The more you do this, the easier it gets to flip into frontal lobe territory when you need to. 

Your imagination is a powerful thing; it can touch the hearts of your customers, invent a new product, replant deforested deserts or resolve seemingly impossible conflicts with an angry teen.  The great news is that you, like everyone else with a frontal lobe, have a great imagination.  The key to setting it free is to be less focused on what you already know.

The redefinition of value

In a recent Nielsen company case study about Greek yogurt (of all things), comes proof that stressed Americans are demanding more value from products, even if the price is somewhat higher.  The equation works like this:  heavy yogurt consumers eat and cook with yogurt primarily because they are health-conscious.  If Greek yogurt is fresher, more nutritious, and better-tasting than lower-priced brands, then Greek yogurt does a better job of providing the core value that is motivating yogurt purchase in the first place.

Still, given the weak economy, why aren't people more focused on price (i.e., so they can save money in case something goes wrong for them, as is happening in so many categories)?  The answer is two-fold.  In the first place, for heavy yogurt buyers, the product is not a discretionary purchase, but a necessary one.  Therefore it's high up on their shopping list, where price is unlikely to prevent them from making a purchase. 

Secondly, the definition of value is emotional as well as rational.  If money itself becomes (or is perceived as) scarce, then it becomes more valuable.  It becomes something you don't want to "throw away" on inferior products.  In this situation, people actually become pickier about quality--because they are just plain mad when a product they buy with their hard-earned money breaks, wears out, or even tastes inferior.

This is potentially bad news for down-price brands--watch for them to pump up their quality message loud and clear!  TJ Maxx is one brand that is emphasizing designer labels over price, showcasing in its social campaigns that you are getting great value for your money (rather than just saving "cash").

Net message?  Message value!

When is it okay to take shortcuts?

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
--Beverly Sills

Normally I'd agree, but I'm no longer really sure about that.  I've recently been working on a project that is one of the most creative and rewarding I've ever been involved with.  In working together so creatively, we have compressed some strategic planning steps, especially research.  We're collaborating very closely with our client, and relying on our collective sense of what "feels right".
 
Normally I'm a stickler for rigorous research, but in this case I'm cobbling together webpage intercepts and fast ad hoc interviews just to reassure the higher-ups that we're not being collectively delusional.  Is ad hoc and opportunistic a good process in this case?   If I had insisted on the long path process, would the work have been improved?

(I want to emphasize that we had some strong quantitative input going in that ensures that we are well grounded in our target's needs. In addition, our target is in fact part of the marketing industry, and most of us have worked with them in the course of our careers.  We're trusting that shared knowledge to let our strategies emerge intuitively.)

To be technical for a moment, our team and our clients are operating in a fully experiential mode-- intuitive, interactive, playful--less rational than usual.  Because we're collaborating, ideas and feedback are compressed into very short timeframes.  This means that there is an unusually fertile interaction going on that is itself providing a strong strategic framework--just not in a rational format.
 
Somehow, I am trusting my instincts.  What might seem like scary shortcuts to the rational side of me looks like imaginitive leaps to the experiential side of me. It helps that the casual research we have done has strongly confirmed that our intuitions are connecting with the audience--that increases my confidence that we are justified in taking big leaps instead of small, processy steps. 
 
Being grounded in an understanding of the target created an empathic framework that in this case is replacing an analytic framework.  Collaborating closely with our client is letting a strategic framework evolve, rather than be "architected."  The research we are doing is being used as a tuning fork, not sheet music.
 
Wow!  This is fun.  I may never have this line-up of circumstances again, but in this case, I think being experiential is going to result in really powerful work.