theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Live from IIeX

2013-06-17T18:12:59-04:00

Best quote of the morning was "In God we trust; all others bring data. If you don't have any data, you're operating on opinion. If it's a contest of opinions, we're using mine."

Observation: one way to ensure everyone has their head down during your talk is to put the conference program on an app.

Next up: Google Consumer Surveys (John Sadow) and Gut Check (Matt Warta) promise to talk about their case study after we listen to their pitch. Odd approach, because most people here would have heard about Google's survey offering, and we'd all be more interested in the pitch after we heard their case study.

I had stopped by the Google booth earlier, because i have this crazy idea that Google Hangouts might be a good real-time webcam research platform. Not sure they really got it, but they did concede that some people are already using Hangouts that way.

The promise of the case study is doing a full quali-quant study in 24 hours with equivalent quality to traditional methods. The category and product: Cover Girl foundation makeup.

Matt says that they don't do a lot of preliminary design - they dive in and do some iterative stuff. First iteration was 25 in-depth interviews (not yet defined exactly what he means by in-depth interview. Not clear how GutCheck is recruiting people. Looks like it is some kind of panel.)

In the end, they took 72 hours to gather data, and a week to provide a report. I'm guessing this was with dedicated individual people resources. Still pretty fast.

What is appealing here -- the ability to iterate quickly, such as with concept development work. They're calling the approach Agile research, a nice label.

Rajan Sambandam of TRC: Behavioural Conjoint: Can Behavioural Economics and Conjoint Analysis Coexist?

Conjoint analysis is an approach that uses statistical modeling to evaluate tradeoffs. A conjoint study will present you with a number of scenarios where you need to choose one of two options, where feature levels and prices are varied. Example: Folger's in a bag for 9.99 or Maxwell House in a can for 8.99. Choice is modeled as a function of each feature being tested.

One difference is that conjoint uses a within-subjects analysis, whereas in behavioural economics, it is a between-subjects design. There is generally some subterfuge in behavioral economics -- the thing being tested is not supposed to be obvious. In conjoint, it is completely obvious.

Another way to look at this: behavioural economics looks at how environmental stimuli affect decision making.

What they did, was run the same study two ways, to determine whether the presence of a picture in the stimuli affected the results of the study, where every other factor is held constant. What did they find? The presence of a picture (even a fairly bland picture of coffee) beats a plain text stimuli across all other factors (such as brand, features, price).

(I think this means that we like anything presented with graphics, more than we like things without graphics. Probably why most advertising has graphics, not just words. But now we have proof. I'm being a bit unfair, because this guy is clever, and a really strong presenter. He would make a good prof, which i guess explains why he is adjunct at Columbia.)

Last up today, Rudy Nadilo of Daprosey talking about Using Data Visualization to Drive Stakeholder Value. He argues that reporting tools have not changed much in 20 years. "Instead of static slides, what if you could provide dynamically generated information in a much more visually engaging way." They're nice infographics, and they appear to be created within their tool. A pitch, but a nice pitch.

Off to cocktails now. And no, I won't be live blogging from there.

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#IIeX - Are we living in a period of unprecedented change?

2013-06-17T11:46:00-04:00

Janet Kosloff, Co-founder and CEO at InCrowd

We believe we are living in a period of unprecedented change.

Janet Kosloff says every era since the Renaissance has believed this. Consider how WWI was viewed -- The War to End All Wars?

Consider, she says, the period between 1986 and 1991 -- stock market crashes, first Gulf War, Wall Street corruption (Milken version). 2000 to 2003 -- more crashes, more corruption (Enron/Anderson version) and the second Gulf War. 2008 to 2011 -- another major crash, another corruption scandal (Madoff) and another war (Libya)

What is happening is that some kinds of changes happen faster -- it's not that there is more change, she says. It's a velocity issue. And it is hard for any single person to keep up.

Kosloff says the solution is to listen to your customers. An old saying, the customer is always right, is still relevant. She references an article from HBR in 1992: Staple Yourself to an Order, which recommends following a single order through an entire process to figure out how to reinvent it.

Successful companies gather customer feedback early and often. They are very attentive to customer detail. She sees that large B2B companies are going to start thinking the same way about customers as Apple, Zappos, Amazon do now. They will do this in order to develop distinct advantages.

What to do to obtain fast, pervasive feedback, and encourage rapid adaptation:

Different communities -- eg patients, nurses, doctors, administrators, scientists
Distinct mechanisms -- different ways to collect, such as mobile, etc.
Dashboards -- visualize and co-ordinate the information
Decisions makers willing to listen and act on the information presented to them

Change is constant, it is how we react to it that is different.

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IIeX Conference 2013 - Live blogging

2013-06-17T09:52:04-04:00

Every time I go to a conference, I take these great notes that I plan to blog about later. Of course, I never get back to it. So this week, I'm going to attempt to assemble clever, insightful and engaging nuggets and post them immediately for you.

First observation: this conference is paperless. There's a Bizzabo app with the agenda, but you might need wifi to log in (as i do). Conferences really need to start putting up a big banner with the passcode, instead of hiding it secretly somewhere. Curious to see how this will work. Will we all be stumbling around trying to figure out what's going on?

Charles Vila, a big cheese (big soup?) from Campbell's is talking about the digital revolution and how it is affecting everyday life. e.g. Facebook is blamed for 20% of divorces. we are all using multiple devices when we interact together at home, while watching TV, a movie, or anything else. (I like the phrase "alone together" to capture this phenomenon.)

"We are gathering insights very differently from what we did five years ago. And we will be gathering insights differently five years from now." He is asking vendors to help him get there. One of the changes made internally? "We have swapped out the Blackberries [of our staff] for iPhones, because that's what the consumers have."

"We need to be looking 10 to 15 years out, in order to make better decisions for today."

From vendors, he wants new solutions that will help him grow his business. New methods for gathering insights, activations. "Speed wins." OK, Charles, that's why I'm here at the conference. Great place to start.

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IIeX - Posting live

2013-06-17T09:51:36-04:00

Update: I am posting live from the IIeX conference happening in Philadelphia this week. Instead of hoping for the time later to capture my notes into a short, pithy, insightful post. Let's see if I can do short and insightful on the fly.

Morning keynotes: Charles Trevail, of Communispace

Charles is talking about that old myth of the genius CEO -- he points out that most organizations don't have a genius leader, so need systemic innovation structures inside the organization.

We are all trying to build temporary monopolies. We can't keep them for long. The question is, how do we find these temporary monopolies, when there are so many fast followers?

For consumers, feelings ARE facts, and are the drivers of most of the decisions in our lives. Consider our families -- we know their facts, but don't always understand their feelings, and it is the feelings that are the critical element in successful relationships.

There is so much noise in the environment that it is challenging to keep up. Charles says, "We are becoming progressively more ignorant."

His big advice about how to find breakthroughs: stop talking about our products and services, and start listening to what is going on with our customers.

His top tips:

Create real relationships with your consumer: approach them with empathy, curiosity, respect. What we need to know more about is what is going on in people's lives.

Example: Henry Ford hospital, has a community restaurant. The guy who started it went out and had dinner with people in their homes "for weeks and weeks and weeks."

Another example, the first flat seats in British Airways, which got them a five year temporary monopoly. However, there was tremendous internal resistance to the concept, because the traditional formula was that smaller seats lead to higher profitability.

Invent together. Involve your customers in the creation of the future.

Do it by playing and dreaming. Discover where people keep their dreams. Live events, they call their Big Talk workshops, with customers and non-customers. [We call ours Discovery Labs, but it's the same idea]

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Think your e-mails are good? Check out Don Cooper's newsletter

2013-05-30T11:48:00-04:00

How many of the e-mail newsletters you receive are truly useful? Truly add value? And how many of them place such a high value on your time that they tell you how long it will take to read the article? Don Cooper has such an unusual newsletter that I asked him to tell me about it in an extended interview earlier this year. We talked about a great many things in addition to the newsletter. In the spirit of Don Cooper, this whole article will take you about six minutes to read. Or you can just scan it for the juicy quotes in about 45 seconds.

Don Cooper's roots in sporting goods and ladies apparel

If the name seems familiar to you, there's a good reason. Don started his business career in the family business sweeping floors for five cents a day. As he says, "Long days and low pay, excellent early training for an entrepreneur." The family business was Cooper Sporting Goods, at one time a world leader in hockey equipment, and a Canadian icon with over 3,000 employees.

When manufacturing began to move to China, the family believed the shift in the industry would change the success dynamics. "We had 70% market share without ever paying a professional athlete a nickel because we made better stuff." In the future, however, they believed it would all be "about who could write the biggest cheque to an already overpaid athlete. We chose not to play."

The next business was a small ladies apparel boutique in Markham, a satellite city of Toronto. A few years after opening it was voted Outstanding Innovative Retailer. A succession of awards and honors for this small retailer led to many requests. "The phone started ringing," Don says, with people saying "Can you come and tell us how you did it?"

Don shifted his career again, and is now a speaker, a consultant and a writer, something he's been doing now for two decades, and clearly loving it. And he has a newsletter. An unusual one.

Understanding what life is like for your customers

When Don started issuing e-articles, he made the useful observation that it is hard to tell how long something is going to be, unlike paper, where you can easily tell by the thickness and weight. But you can start to read an e-article based on its catchy title, and "you get to page nine and you ask when are they going to get to the point? And the answer is maybe, never!"

From Don's point of view, no one has the time for the nine-page article anymore. "My commitment to my readers is, if I haven't figured out how to say something on a particular subject or area of marketing or management in 45 to 90 seconds, I haven't thought about it long enough and well enough to take your time with my imperfect thoughts."

So he set a standard that articles would run from 45 to 90 seconds to read, and he would say how long it would take for the average reader to read each article. You see a title and an estimated time to read it.

This to me, was a brilliant insight. It shows tremendous respect for the reader, and instantly communicates a lot about the brand of Don Cooper at the same time.

"To me it's so simple, but it blows people away. It's a matter of sitting down and thinking about what life is really like for our customers and then having the courage and creativity to do what is extraordinary."

Write short and punchy; write like you speak

Don says he trys to apply this respect principle to everything he does in life. Understand the customer, develop some insight into their world, then show some respect for that insight. "I try to apply that to everything I do in life," he says. "So the articles are short and punchy. I write like I speak."

Many of us, he says, "change personality" when we get to the keyboard. "We become much more stiff, much more formal. Nobody actually talks like that."

Having spoken to Don at length, I can attest to his claim that his articles have the same straightforward, straight-talk, no-BS approach that he presents in person. He believes being congruent and consistent in this way is a critical part of branding. "They signed up for your newsletter because they like the way you speak, and if the way you write is nothing like that, you let them down."

You promised them a newsletter, not endless promotions

I have noticed that Don's newsletters are pretty light on the pitch. He agreed, "There's maybe 5% pitch and 95% real value." So many people "call it a newsletter but it isn't. It's a blatant pitch for their stuff."

For Don, this is a question of integrity. But integrity works. "I think the best way to sell your stuff is to send such value and such engaging content in an interesting, thought provoking way that they want more and they ask you how they could do that."

He's speaking my language here. So I ask him what his open rate is, but unfortunately, he does not know, except that it's higher than average.

Is it a lot of work, I ask? Absolutely, he says. But I get the feeling he loves it for it's own sake. He keeps an e-file where he stores ideas, as well as a cardboard file folder for paper notes. "They both get larger every month," he says, adding he never finds a shortage of things to think and write about.

One of the benefits of writing regularly like this, Don says, is that your ability to see things improves. "Your mind turns to thinking about things so you have created a space for wonderful, for ideas, for helpfulness. You've created the possibility and your mind turns to it."

Emotional, functional, and financial value and the magic of connectivity

Don is particularly interested in topics that add emotional value. "There's only three kinds of value in the world, emotional value, functional value, and financial value and they're in that order." Financial value is often placed first, but this is incorrect, according to Don. "Financial value is I paid a good price for all the functional and emotional value I got."

"If we're not adding emotional value to everything we do, to the functional and financial value, then we're missing the magic of connectivity."

It's important to pay attention to sources of value, because every industry is in "a crisis of overcapacity." "The world doesn't need another mediocre anything. Mediocrity is no longer an option."

Don says he is old enough to remember "the days when you could actually make a very good living being medicore in any line of work," but that those days are long gone. Instead, we need to strive to be extraordinary in everything that we do, including "our customer value, our customer experience, our operating efficiency so that we can be well priced and profitable."

And then we need to be sure we tell our story. "There's no point in being the best if you're also the world's best-kept secret."

Be the "caring coach" to your customers

Customers will inevitably leave you, he asserts, because they move, they change, or eventually death takes them. So you constantly have to find new customers, but also nurture relationships with the ones you have.

"We need to build relationships with people who already know us, love us, and trust us and the best way to do that is to create a great database." Any business can do this, Don says. Which all ties back into the newsletter.

People want a "caring coach", someone they trust to help them. "One of the great ways to deliver that help and that value is by creating the database and using it responsibly to delivery news, tips, and updates to our customers."

Thanks, Don, for a fabulous conversation!

Resources

Don Cooper was recently interviewed by The Globe and Mail about getting clarity on your corporate goals.

Don Cooper's web site is where you can get his newsletter and other resources.

When surveys don't work

2013-05-28T12:23:00-04:00

A recent international study about blood donors shows why asking direct questions of people is not always a good basis for decision making.

The background

International guidelines prohibit monetary incentives for blood donation, based on concerns that any form of incentive may actually reduce motivation, at the same time as it puts the blood supply at risk from those motivated only by the cash rewards.

Extrinsic rewards (i.e. cash) can sometimes interfere with intrinsic rewards (feeling good about yourself).

The surveys showed one result

These policies have had support from surveys that ask people if they would donate blood based on receiving cash rewards.

"Policies that prohibit monetary incentives have been based primarily on population surveys in which respondents were asked if they would donate blood if offered a cash reward, and the majority nixed that idea. But Lacetera said responses were based on a hypothetical premise, not on studies of actual potential donors who were offered an incentive."

Nico Lacetera quoted in Globe and Mail

The real world experiments showed another

Actual experiments showed very different results. Donations increased for all sorts of things, like a day off work (Italy), a $5 lottery ticket (Switzerland), a $10 gift card (USA.)

What it all means: be careful with hypotheticals

We need to be careful when asking people direct questions about hypothetical situations. Human beings are great at coming up with answers, but our own ideas about our behavior are not always accurate. The futher removed we are from the real world situation the more this is true.

Running small experiments is a much better approach, whenever possible. In digital marketing and in things like loyalty programs, it is pretty easy to do this, and marketers are learning a lot from testing approaches.

But what if you can't run an experiment?

You should still try to avoid just asking the direct question. As a researcher, what I try to do is set up tasks that are similar, ask indirect questions, observe actual behavior, and otherwise try to overcome this problem.

Topics that are most likely to give you problems are direct questions involving motivation, hypothetical situations, and any topic where there are strong social beliefs or taboos, or where people might desire to paint themselves in a positive light. (A great many things, in fact!)

Resources

Here's a more detailed discussion from researcher Nicola Lacetera written in 2008

Here's the source of the scientific article in Science: Economic Rewards to Motivate Blood Donations published in 2013