Many B2C marketers these days are turning to data and analytics to drive customer-centric outcomes. But the higher you go up in organizations, the more difficult it is to get a true picture of what your customer is like – competing priorities and the abstraction needed to run a very large enterprise run counter to focus on details of the customer experience.

Payless, an American shoe retailer, faced this problem a few years back. Facing competitive threats from big-box discounters, a deteriorating customer experience, and a management team far-removed from the average customer, the company’s CMO tried to drive improvements in the customer experience but predictably failed due to lack of senior management buy-in.

Realizing that the company needed to make the lack of customer focus “real” to senior executives, Marketing arranges a series of executive-immersion sessions. They listen in on focus groups to learn the characteristics of core segments, then “act out” those segments in a series of visits to Payless and competitor stores – a constraint that forces them to remove their functional hats and view stores from the perspective of a consumer, rather than an operations or a finance executive.

A key part of the visits to Payless stores is that they are unannounced and incognito. Executives, assuming their roles as a particular customer persona, shop in the store as any other customer would, avoiding the problem of stores “preparing” for pre-announced visits.

The end result? Executives quickly figured out where the customer experience was lacking and identified a few key elements to fix, leading to higher same-store sales and increased foot traffic and customer satisfaction.

MLC members, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay on how companies – including Payless – have pioneered consistent, differenteated, and delightful customer experience.

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »

Click it, type it or just ask Siri – today information is available as never before. Given their information choices today, the ability to process it is becoming a limiting factor for consumers. The result – a lot of marketing messaging is wasteful, as consumers pay no attention to it – not because they don’t want to, but because they cannot. So should marketers shout louder to grab attention? Absolutely not.

Focused on expanding the share of voice, marketers may be guilty of paying very little attention to streamlining the information path for their consumers. In a noisy marketplace, consumers today are faced with analysis-paralysis, and increasing marketing messaging has done nothing, but confused them. This has resulted in delayed or reduced responsiveness to marketing messages. So what should marketers do? Read More »

Managing the cross-channel experience is the second third biggest priority for B2C marketers next year, according to our recent member polling.   It’s no surprise, given the growing number of channels to coordinate as well as consumers’ high expectations.

The problem?  Customer-facing employees lack visibility into how their work fits together with other teams’ efforts to impact the whole experience.  As the channel mix grows in complexity, even managers can struggle to keep to visualize the entire experience.

Enter Marketing at United Services (a pseudonymed North American financial services company).  They illustrate every interaction customers have with the brand – at each stage of the purchase (and repurchase) cycle – on huge poster boards.  To bring it to life, they even display actual examples of marcomm materials, such as direct mail or screenshots of TV ads.  Depicting the entire experience in one place helps employees see the big picture.  MLC members, see a sample storyboard here.

United Services highlight three key elements of the consumer experience: Read More »

Earlier this year Wells Fargo announced its new presence in Manhattan through a ‘flash mob’, recorded for posterity on YouTube:

Read More »

With social media an increasing part of budgets and mindshare in most marketing organizations, we thought we’d do a quick run-down of some of the biggest ways corporate social media efforts fail. What do you think? Let us know in comments below: Read More »

Improved technology, policy intervention, and the recession have led to broad structural changes in a number of industries we write about on Wide Angle, but probably none so much as healthcare. In the past few years, we’ve seen a major health reform effort in the US that will bring millions of new patients into the system, growing consensus around a reformation of the patent system abroad, and technological shifts that may soon allow for a very rapid scaling in diagnosis and other medical services.

So, how should marketers expect their jobs to change? We came up with a few ways; let us know more in comments! Read More »

Walt Disney World is a vacation destination beloved by many (including me).  Its themed rides, immaculately dressed characters, and song-and-dance-filled shows are hard for most brands to emulate, but there are several non-princess-based strategies marketers can use to boost their own brands: Read More »

It’s been a week since Apple’s co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs passed away, and we’ve seen all sorts of tributes and analyses of his impact on the corporate and broader worlds. One interesting one, from our colleagues across the hall in CEB’s Tech practice, echoes a number of themes we’ve seen in other recollections of Jobs’ legacy – that his focus on the customer and user experience was the thing that made him different from other tech execs, who were content to focus on computing efficiency and power, instead.

I don’t think this is wrong, per se. But do I think it misses a key paradox. Jobs and the company he created did invent wonderful user experiences, but they did it in the exact way that most companies wouldn’t.

For most of us, a focus on the customer means that we make a commitment to go above and beyond to address customer complaints and needs, and that we find smarter ways to incorporate their feedback into all aspects of our business. So, a customer focus initiative might raise customer planning to the level of other important enterprise planning processes, like Tesco did. The basic model? If we listen better, and do a better job of incorporating our learnings into our products and services, we’ll resonate more with customers and sell more stuff.

By contrast, Jobs and Apple succeeded by having a compelling vision. They ignored their users almost entirely – at least in the product design process – and focused on an integrated, streamlined design – an enlightened, benevolent tyranny of sorts. Jobs was famous for a kind of perfectionism that most executives would think absurd: for instance, he once asked engineers working on the original Macintosh to re-design the computer’s motherboard – a part most users would never see – because it looked inelegant. OS X, Apple’s current operating system, was delayed by six months over Jobs’ dissatisfaction with the way the scroll bars worked. Taken individually, these are elements of design that very few users would notice or care about; but together they created the famous Mac user experience.

The user experiences of Apple products – from iOS devices to Mac computers – reflect the user experience Steve Jobs wanted, not the one his customers would have told him they wanted, if he’d bothered to ask. And it worked – but there are pretty big risks with going this route. Apple relied on Jobs’ design vision to make its products work, and if his vision had been faulty, or hadn’t resonated with the market, they’d be in trouble. His vision raised costs, both for the consumer and for the company itself. His insistence that the user experience be uniform across all applications significantly limited the developer pool for Apple devices (at least, at first, until the iPhone became an irresistible hit). The relative inability to customize the experience limited – and still limits – Apple’s penetration into the business market.

But Apple’s focus on top-down design – rather than the needs of customers, as they might report them – is a counterpoint to a growing trend in the corporate world of finding new and inventive ways to find out what customers want, and do exactly that. It’s a vote for visions over data, and that’s a dichotomy we’ll probably explore a bit in this year’s research.

Do you have thoughts on the right balance between vision and data? Let us know in comments.

Picture this – you have a great product, and you’re pitching it to a client. You talk about how your product will help their business grow. And just as you speak, the client throws back a number of statistics at you and in turn convinces you that your product isn’t suitable for their firm. Does this sound familiar?

Armed with unprecedented market information, buyers today are harder to impress than before. So is it impossible for B2B marketers exhibit the real value of their products to today’s empowered customers? Absolutely not – as we learned from MLC members FedEx.

FedEx realized that the primary reason clients don’t understand solution ROI is because it is hard for them to quantify it. So instead of quantifying solution value to their clients, FedEx created ValuePoint – an online calculator that allows clients to enter their own assumptions and customize value calculations. Read More »