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.

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.

Even though the weather and leaves are just beginning to turn, and we still have to get through Columbus Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving before turning our thoughts to visions of sugarplums and eight crazy nights, marketers are hard at work figuring out ways to close the year off strong with a good holiday season.

But how should they do it, while stengthening their brand positions for the year to come? We’ve got a few tips below:

Find ways to lighten the load. For kids, the holiday season is a magical, wonderful time of presents, candy, and sometimes magical elves. For adults, though, it’s probably among the most stressful times of the year – even if the stress is likely to pay off in the form of fun with family and friends.

Great brands recognize that not only is the season particularly hectic, the very act of brand interaction might be, too. Finding ways to save consumers time and money, as well as raising the chances they’ll make the right choice when it comes to gifts, can pay dividends throughout the rest of the year.

So how does this play out practically? Offer your consumers some measures of assurance that they’re making the right choices. Some brands we’ve studied have done this through transparent buying guides – presenting consumers with a range of criteria and offering relevant gift ideas for each – while others have gone the technology route, using social networks to make gift recommendations.

Clarify the brand promise – and deliver it, 100%. There’s no better time to make sure brand promises are airtight – and delivery consistent – than the holidays. The uptick in shopping offers brands an opportunity to make a positive imprint on the consumer, but if crowd-weary shoppers aren’t satisfied with what they get, you may suffer the consequences the rest of the year.

MLC has a wealth of material designed to help companies consistently deliver their brand promises: for instance, here’s how Exxon Mobile motivated employees to consistent brand delivery, how Starbucks ensured consistent brand delivery across all touchpoints – human and not human, and how we recommend brands ensure consistent brand delivery across geographies and segments.

Find avenues of emotional differentiation. Here’s the place where brands – particularly consumer and retail brands – have a golden opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition: finding areas of shared values and ways to emotionally differentiate themselves from competitors. We’ve found, for instance, that brands that align with consumers around emotional values perform at a much higher level than brands that emphasize functional differentiators.

Luckily, emotions are running high during the holiday season, and there are a number of brands that have particularly strong associations with the holidays. Macy’s, for instance, is associated in my mind with the holidays: their sponsorship of the Thanksgiving Day parade and the movie “Miracle on 34th St.” form that association in my mind, and I’m much more likely to shop there during the holidays than at any other time.

Understand and fit into seasonal routines. Routines shift a bit during the holidays for a lot of people and families. I’d say that, on average, one is more likely to bake cookies on a random Tuesday night during December than in other months; one is more likely to visit a mall in December than in other times, one is more likely to drive around looking at tacky Christmas lights – all sorts of things.

Brands that unearth subtle shifts in consumer routines during the holidays can capitalize big on them. For instance: there’s the classic case of General Mills’ Betty Crocker brand figuring out that parents often spent the first week of the holidays doing nothing special, then felt guilty about doing so. So the brand targeted cookie-baking in the second week of the holidays, figuring this was an easy way to assuage parental guilt about not being festive enough.

MLC members, how are you shifting your brand communications mix for the holidays? Let us know in comments below.

When it comes to selling, industrial manufacturers appear to have an edge over service providers – their offering is tangible, labeled and goes wrong less often. As anyone who has ever wondered where all the familiar buttons went after a software upgrade will agree. Our B2B Purchase Decision Data, collected from over 1500 customers for this year’s research, affirms this seeming advantage for manufacturers:  their customers are more likely to say they’ll recommend, repurchase, consider new offerings and prefer a specific supplier.  But the victory rings empty, as you’ve just been running a race with the wrong set of companies.

Indeed, given the inherent industry advantage, many manufacturers may feel entitled to think themselves relatively secure. But when customers are asked questions that entail comparison between manufacturers of the same industry, they become indecisive, delay contacting suppliers and are swayed by details that suppliers overlook. From a competitive angle, here’s how things shape up: Read More »

“To do a Domino’s”: To admit your mistakes and take steps to amend.

“Doing a Domino’s” entered the vernacular following Domino’s self-critical 2010 campaign, which acknowledged that its pizza “taste[d] like cardboard” and promised to improve the taste.

Domino’s mea culpa coincided with a 14% revenue boost, a 10+ percentage point increase in taste perceptions, a 613% growth in Facebook fans, and a 83% share price increase.

Could admitting your failings do the same thing for you?  MLC’s 2011 research on purchase drivers suggests so. Read More »

My colleague Anna spent the second half of last week at the Association of National Advertiser’s annual conference, and reports back that much of the talk of social media metrics at the meeting focused on raw volumetrics: Facebook fans achieved, Twitter followers accrued, clicks on that link, time on site for this one. In short, traditional metrics of social media “engagement” still hold a lot of sway among marketers seeking to evaluate their social campaigns relative to others.

And why not? Friends and followers are the simplest social media metric we have available to us, and the one that’s most likely to track real-world engagement with a brand’s online presence. In the presence of other pros who speak the social language, they’re an easy way to benchmark a campaign’s performance.

But out in the broader business world, we’re hearing that senior executives, especially ones without social backgrounds, are finding it hard to contextualize friend/follower metrics in a way that links back to business results. Former H&R Block social media ringmaster Zena Weist explains to us the limitations of traditional social metrics:

Read More »

To make marketing efforts more trusted, brands typically turn to consumer recommendations. That’s the right move, since a brand’s own information will never appear as objective as an outsider’s viewpoint. The problem is, consumer recommendations are often too vague to convince today’s anxious shoppers to buy.

Instead of targeting recommenders, brands should be targeting advisors: consumers who teach other shoppers when, why, and how to buy. While recommenders focus on features and benefits and only discuss positive points, advisors cover both pros and cons and also share information about the best usage occasions and retailers. This extra detail makes their suggestions far more persuasive and helpful. The chart below outlines the key differences between recommenders and advisors.

There are two challenges with harnessing consumer advisors:

1. How to find consumers who will make good advisors (not just good recommenders)
2. How to teach consumers to provide better advice

Intuit’s Quicken Software group has done some good work on both fronts. First, they have a thorough ambassador screening process that ensures selected consumers are both genuine brand lovers and also credible sources of information. MLC members, see their screening questions here.

Second, they don’t just do research to understand what kinds of advice shoppers’ need. They also interview advisors to understand barriers to advice-giving, e.g., it’s hard to bring up the topic of personal finance. Based on the findings from this research, they create a toolkit of educational materials and incentives that target ambassadors’ top concerns. MLC members, see their research and targeted ambassador toolkit here.

You have a great product but customers are not talking about it. Maybe either think it’s boring, or just too personal to talk about and advocate for. How can you generate word of mouth to increase sales and build the brand?

Faced with this challenge, Intuit built its advocacy program on the following insights:

• No matter what your product, there is a group of people which is naturally interested in it
• The product or something outside of it needs to be interesting to get people talking
• People hesitate in talking about products they like if they relate to personal matters like finances

So how did this work for Quicken? Intuit kicked off the Quicken advocacy program by inviting applications for brand ambassadors on its website. These advocates were existing customers who had a healthy interest in the brand. Intuit encouraged advocates to talk about the product by using rewards, such as the opportunity to interact with Quicken GMs over dinner. Also, being Quicken brand ambassadors served as the ‘something interesting’ that advocates could talk about.

Beyond equipping advocates, Intuit marketers identified barriers to advocacy.  For Quicken, the chief barrier came in demonstrating the product—turns out advocates get squeamish about showing the software to others with their personal financial situation front-and-center.  So Intuit developed fake screenshots of data to include in the product kit enabling advocates to give a demo without sharing their own personal data.

How do you create brand advocacy?

MLC members: Peter Karpas, President and Division General Manager of Intuit’s Quicken Health Group and formerly Intuit’s Chief Marketing and Product Management Officer, shared his perspective on developing high impact brand advocacy programs. We broke down Mr. Karpas’ valuable advice into short clips here, or listen to the full replay of the webinar here.

This morning, I was reading the Wall Street Journal’s summary of the 9th annual All Things Digital Conference (D9).  A subtle, but very important thread caught my attention.  The rapid evolution in consumer technology is changing competitive dynamics across most every category.  It’s leading brands (and not only high-tech ones) to compete not just against competitors in their category, but against a broader range of substitutes for consumers’ attention.

Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, talks about the way that the home video business has changed in the last few years. “People feel they do not have to own a movie unless they really like the movie.  It’s not just a buy because we may want to watch it one day. One of the reasons for that is the competition for their time.”  [italics are mine]

Similarly, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, points out that it will compete with satellite and cable competitors much more directly, because “in the long term, we’re all competing for a time share of the consumer”.  In the past, separate media pipes (cable/satellite vs. Internet) meant these models didn’t compete as directly.  But with digital convergence, it’s easy to see how Netflix and Comcast are going to bump into each other much more often.

In both cases, the “time share” of the consumer boils down to the finite attention that consumers have to give.  Here are a few facts that bring the issue into vivid focus: Read More »

As the economic recovery continues to take hold, marketers are seeing a huge opportunity to capture the mindshare of consumers coming out from under the recessionary cloud. To be sure – consumer habits are hard to break, and it looks like the ones formed in this recession are particularly sticky. But as individual finances begin to improve, there will be some room for marketers to forge brand loyalty with new consumers, particularly those who are younger.

So there’s a market opportunity out there – but can your organization take advantage of it? Luckily, MLC has been investigating the drivers of brand loyalty for a few years now, culminating first in our 2009 study for B2C marketers, Accelerating Loyalty, and again in our upcoming work around consumer decision processes. To get a sense of what it takes to create deep consumer-to-brand connections, we decided to analyze the success of Zipcar – a company whose intense brand loyalty recently spurred it to a big IPO – within our framework.

Surprise! Zipcar scores high on all of our B2C loyalty drivers. Car rental is a commodity business with rather low margins; what is Zipcar doing that inspires loyalty far beyond the traditional players in the space? Three ideas: Read More »