Many brands want to offer their customers an individualized shopping experience, so they offer products like design-your-own Kleenex boxes and personalized M&Ms. These products give an infinite number of possibilities: you can choose your own colors, upload photos, write catchy sayings.  In essence, they give you exactly what you want.

But in a world with far too many decisions, simpler can be (and often is) better.  With fewer choices, consumers can be much happier and far less likely to divert from the purchase path.  But in the real world, it is almost impossible for brands to significantly reduce the number of options they provide.

So furniture retailer La-Z-Boy decided to take a different approach that gives the consumer a more streamlined shopping experience: in-store segmentation. The furniture-maker realized its customers craved individualization, so – through a needs-based segmentation strategy – it gave them exactly that. Read More »

(the following is a guest post from Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of sales)

Nobody can sell an idea better than television’s Don Draper, the creative advertising genius in the show Mad Men. And after watching nearly the entire series in an embarrassingly short amount of time, I think I know what makes him so good: Don Draper is a Challenger™. He understands his customers’ businesses better than they do, and isn’t afraid to tell them. And if a customer ignores his advice in favor of bad ideas, he’ll likely fire them.

Here are three things Don Draper knows that most sellers and corporate executives haven’t figured out:

1. The customer is always wrong.

   Watch Don Draper tell the customer they’re wrong

   The “customer is always right” mantra has long driven marketers and salespeople to bend over backwards to satisfy insane customer demands, only to then wonder why customers are disappointed when they get exactly what they’d asked for.

   Not Don Draper—he leaves that attitude for customer service. Don Draper knows that if he were to create the advertisement the customer asked for, he’d end up producing the same ad as every other agency. Not a recipe for loyalty.

   Our research – as well as practical experience – indicates that customers do not always know what they want, and serious work is needed to unearth unarticulated and poorly-understood desires within the targeted company or segment. MLC members, see how companies like Reynolds and Reynolds and Texas Instruments achieve customer understanding beyond articulated needs.

2. Too much productivity can be a bad thing.

   Don Draper is famous for taking naps at work, lying on his couch until inspiration strikes. In one episode, when new management tries to clamp down on employees’ down-time, Don fires back, “You came here because we do this better than you… and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.”

   The lesson for marketers isn’t that we should start napping instead of working, but simply that there’s a limit to how much activity we can squeeze out of ourselves before it takes a toll on the quality of our work. In complex sales, MLC research shows that Marketing and Sales need to be creative and innovate on deals, and reps need to take time to research customers before charging in. But creativity can’t be forced. A whole body of recent scientific evidence proves what Don Draper knew instinctively: that the brain needs time to relax and wander in order come up with good ideas.

   MLC members: check out our ideation topic center for more on developing innovative marketing and sales approaches.

3. Emotion trumps reason in sales.

   Everyone these days seems to want a better ROI calculator. “If only we can quantify the value we bring,” the thinking goes, “we can convince the customer to buy.” But Don Draper knows that people buy because of emotion, not reason; they use ROI to justify in their heads a decision they’ve already made in their gut.

   Instead of pitching customers on his ads’ ROI, Don Draper tells stories that connect to their deepest emotions, and forcefully challenges customers to see their business in a new light. Our work on customer loyalty confirms that products’ emotional benefits drive greater differentiation than their functional benefits. Financial impact matters, but it’s a piece of the puzzle, not the Holy Grail.

   MLC members: learn how Dow Chemical discovers what drives loyalty at the segment level, and how Fannie Mae ensures that sales reps are working loyalty drivers into their conversations with customers.

Do any Mad Men fans out there have additional sales or business lessons they’ve gleaned from the show? Please leave them in the comments below!

An IBM study released this week suggests the shine is off social media.  It’s a meme you may have picked up on in the last three months.  We wrote about it last October in a post called “Avoiding the Sophomore Social Stall”, as we started to detect MLC members hitting a wall 12-18 months into their social efforts.

We argued that the underlying driver of the social stall for most companies is that they build their social house on sand, not bedrock.  In other words, they use social media to reinforce existing ways of creating value, rather than seeking to create new-in-kind value for their customers in ways that are uniquely suited to the advantages of social media.  These execution challenges are all the more disheartening when you think about the overinflated expectations created by the hype, which was fueled by venture capital firms, social media vendors, and rapidly growing social media platforms, all of whom had a strong economic interest in (over)hyping. Read More »

Let’s say you’re a leading consumer brand, and you’re looking for customer feedback during the NPD process. What do you ask, and how do you ask it? Who are you asking – is it the median user, or a brand passionate, a lead user? Do you go to your potential customers in the end, asking them their opinions on superficial aspects of the new product, or do you involve them from the beginning? For most companies, the answer is simple – customer involvement in the NPD process is a box to check after principal product development is complete, and the people asked for feedback are representative of the mass market. Read More »

Special thanks to Laura Newman in our sister program, the Communications Executive Council, for inspiration on this topic by way of her original post on the CEC Insider blog.

As my past posts indicate, I spend a lot of time waxing poetic about social media and its expanding role in B2B marketing.  My research coworkers and I have heard a lot of reasons for why some companies are not yet pursuing new media strategies with gusto – despite recognizing their importance. Reluctance is based on a variety of things including lack of internal support, lack of knowledge or expertise, lack of resources, and the list goes on.  Another worry we sometimes hear – particularly from financial services firms – is the challenges of pursuing social media in a regulated industry. Read More »

I recently had to subject myself to snack shopping for a bunch of seven-year-olds and their dads for a weekend camping trip. (Why I would subject myself to a weekend camping with a bunch of seven-year-olds and their dads is another matter altogether)  What should have been a five-minute blast through the snack aisle turned into 20 minutes of anxiety and frustration.  Why?  Because something as simple as grabbing a box of fruit snacks turned into a shelf-scanning, label-reading nightmare. Read More »

We recently conducted a survey of over 6,000 US and UK consumers, exploring why people purchase and what purchase path they follow.

As Karen’s post explains, only a third of consumers follow the traditional ‘funnel’ path (i.e., start with many options in mind and winnow down to one), while another third follow a ‘spindle’ approach (i.e., continuously add options to their consideration set before choosing one).  The final third follow a ‘tunnel’ purchase path. That is, they never consider more than one brand – and simply buy the first brand they consider.

‘Tunnel’ purchasers have stronger brand intent, are less likely to switch, and are more likely to repurchase and recommend.  As such, we’ve been looking into what makes people ‘tunnel’ and how brands can drive more ‘tunnels’. The findings have surprised us.  It turned out that all our assumptions were wrong. Read More »

(the following is a guest post from Robert Mulrennan at Iconoculture, MLC’s sister program that tracks consumer trends)

China is the world’s most populous country and the fastest-growing economy.  With 1.3 billion people, it’s a giant piece of future market potential for global brands.  As marketers try to tap into the growth offered by the Chinese market, many are watching Chinese brands beat them to the punch, making rapid inroads into established, western markets.   Haier is a noteworthy example: an established home appliance brand in China, this brand has carved out a prominent space in the highly competitive US appliance market.  Watching Haier we can learn a few lessons that might inform our own strategies for entering growth markets outside of our current footprint:

• Finding White Space: Haier Group made initial inroads in the U.S. market by focusing on novel product categories such as refrigerated wine cellars; Haier has since captured 50% of the market for these devices, gaining a foothold that they can use to migrate from niche to big ticket purchases.
• Leveraging The Halo Effect: After establishing itself in compact refrigerators and wine coolers, the company has entered other categories—it now sells 2% of all full-size refrigerators in the U.S., 16% of window air conditioners, and recently introduced a line of flat-screen TVs and DVD players.
• Playing to Local Perceptions: The name Haier was adapted from German to deliberately obscure the company’s Chinese origins and play to North American perceptions of German quality and reliability.

So what about western brands entering the Chinese market?  Join Iconoculture’s lead Consumer Strategist covering East Asia, Jeff Yang on May 3^rd, for an overview of recent trends, developments, and shifts in consumer behavior in China. We’ll unpack the unique “cultural DNA” of this incredible market and take a closer look at brands that have successfully captured the mindshare of Chinese consumers. Council members can register here.

For a quick look into what consumers are doing in China, Council members can also check out a few of Iconoculture’s latest global consumer observations.

Consider all the screens you interact with on a daily basis: smart phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, in-store video, big-screen TV, screens at sports events, screens in automobiles/ airplanes, and many others.  Total adult daily viewing devoted to watching all of these screens: 8.5 hours (for those age 45-54, its 9.5 hours). That’s a lot of time spent peering at a screen and a great place for marketers to reach consumers. But what about all the marketing communication we receive on these screens every day? Do we absorb them all the same way? Do they stick with us equally, regardless of the format? Read More »

Last week, a company used to making news for good reasons – Apple – instead made news for something a little disturbing: apparently, if you have an iPhone, its been keeping a running log of your location for the last year or so – without your consent. An insanely-detailed running log, in fact, complete with timestamps and location pinpoints based on triangulation from cell towers. If you have a Mac that you sync your phone to, you can map your location history by downloading this program. As an example, here are my collected travels since June 2010: Read More »