theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Consumer Curation: How big can look small

2013-04-11T10:31:00-04:00

I love how Longo's is packaging their house roasted coffee. Just look at this gorgeous bag, carefully hand labelled with the roast, including the temperature (!) If the roaster had signed the bag, it would have fit.

Which so totally fits with the house brand mark, "Signature."

[Do they give the baristas training in architectural lettering? Or are all baristas artists needing steady jobs?]

This is a wonderful example of how consumers (like us!) value things that feel personalized and individual. They may be mass-market products, but they feel like neighborhood boutique.

We curate our lives now, to the extent our means allow us. With so much to choose from, how else would we go about it?

How else can you make your big brand look small and boutique?

Finding insight: what art projects have in common with insights projects

2013-04-08T08:43:00-04:00

The art project, now documented as a book, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (And Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps is an interesting exercise in insight finding.

The artist, Becky Cooper, was initially asked to document the locations of public art in the city as a paid project, and realized how we create our own internal maps of places. How each space is formed of our memories and our experiences. So she created some maps on a printing press, and asked people to fill them in.

These three samples from the Tumblr site are wonderful examples of how people responded in highly diverse ways. As a researcher, I can tell you that this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I see when I ask people to produce a projective exercise* of this kind, such as a collage or a mind-map, or a video, or a story.

You can see how much rich information is here to be mined, should one choose to do so.

One could easily argue that all great art is about innovation and insight, actually. If you are ever in need of inspiration, look at what contemporary artists are doing.

Resources:

I learned about this work via BrainPickings, a somewhat unfortunate name for my new favorite e-mail newsletter.

*Projective technique: has it's origins in Freud and Rorsach. Great definition from my buddy Monica Zinchiak: an "ambiguous stimulus designed to evoke inner thoughts and emotions". The purpose is to start a different kind of conversation.

Are people gaming your customer satisfaction surveys?

2013-03-28T11:51:05-04:00

We love our car dealer, we actually do. They look after us well. You could picnic on the floor of their service department, it's so clean. The organization prides itself on service, and wants to do well on the customer satisfacton index.

In fact, they are so focused on this that they help their customers anticipate and respond to the questionnaire even before it arrives!

"...please take the time to complete the survey with all 10's if we met and exceeded all your expectations"

It's hard to say what impact this approach is actually having on the feedback they receive. Certainly the letter provides a clear indication that they are trying hard.

One thing I do wonder about is this -- does their approach mean that their actual results are almost useless to them in terms of monitoring and improving? It might. You'd need a statistician to help you determine this based on comparing sets of data.

There's an interesting thread on LinkedIn discussing the challenges of actual cheating on this kind of survey, and how it can be detected using statistical methods.

My take:

If you want to know what's really going on with your customers, you probably need to go beyond this kind of automatic approach. Or at least supplement it with some telephone interviews or some good qualitative research.

Another problem with expectations is that they are always moving up, based on your past performance. So exceeding expectations becomes exceedingly difficult.

A modest proposal about procurement: let's turn the RFP process on it's head

2013-03-21T10:56:50-04:00

The procurement process, and it's main product, the Request for Proposal or RFP, was once useful, but has become a barrier to innovaton and productivity.

Let's look first at the reasons why:

There is a desire for fairness and consistency.

While fairness is admirable when it is reducing corruption and patronage, it also suppresses merit. It favors the familiar. It favors the formulaic.

The investment of time is all on the side of the supplier.

The decision-makers sometimes decline to meet or talk to the suppliers being asked to bid. Usually. The rationale - hey, they're busy people, they don't have time for a bunch of conversations. This is a major suppression of collaboration and idea exchange, which again results in a suppression of innovation. Buyers who had to invest the time to actually talk to all suppliers would reduce their short list. They might stop focusing on price, and instead focus on judgement. Like who they are motivated to work with. Who they think is triggering useful thinking. Who has better ideas.

There is frequently no clear definition of the challenge, but there is sometimes a specification of solutions.

This is so upside down it would be laughable if it weren't so common. The best consultants are those that help redefine the essence of the problem, then engineer elegant ways to address it. Sometimes much less expensive ways.

Systematic extraction of collaborative effort. Lack of trust

It is through collaboration, especially in the discovery phase, that considerable value is added. If there is any hope of collaboration throughout the project, it should start at the beginning, when the work is being designed.

One of the worst parts of the whole procurement process as it exists today is that new relationships begin with a lack of trust and a lack of disclosure. Not a great way to start a working relationship where trust and disclosure are going to be absolutely essential for success.

When you are awarded a project under these conditions, you are often starting over when you actually sit down with the client.

The traditional RFP starts with the notion of specifying the process or "work product", and asking for pricing.

While this may make sense for road-building (road builders may disagree!), it rarely makes sense for the kind of squishy and amorphous situation that most business executives are facing today.

No budget disclosure

The underlying belief here seems to be that if you tell the supplier your budget, they will spend all of it. Or perhaps they will not fine tune their proposal enough, not be as aggressive as they could have been on pricing.

This lack of budget disclosure also leads to a frequently encountered situation. The client suggests they are prepared to invest in a BMW. So you propose a few options. BMW, high-end BMW, and perhaps a very nice Toyota, in case they didnt know what BMWs actually cost.

Client then discloses that in fact they were thinking in terms of a BMW motorcycle. Yikes. I just spent three days wasting my time and a bunch of other people's time designing the wrong thing.

Plus, there almost always is a budget. On a recent situation, a team I was on was asked to trim a very specific amount of money from a large quote, in order to fit a budget window that we had not been given. Where is the logic in this?

Let's turn this upside-down

Start with the investment

An improved RFP process would start with the investment -- what the client is prepared to pay for a solution -- and invite proposers to say how much they can offer within this budget (or perhaps less).

This approach would solve a problem that we often face as suppliers -- an unwillingness to state even a range of value. It means that the suppliers, without the benefit of looking at your financial information, have to determine what the value of a good solution is to this specific challenge.

But inside the firm, you do understand if it's worth $10,000 or $100,000 to get a grip on this issue.

This virtually guarantees you will receive a template solution. Or your bidders have to take some wild guesses about what might be going on and design to that.

Disclosure

Make me sign the non-disclosure, then give me some real disclosure to work with.

Focus on capabilities and fit, not pricing

You don't want to wear the cheapest shoes, do you? Did you choose your employees based on getting the cheapest people you could get? Or were you looking for a combination of skills and fit? When you go for a haircut, are you going for the $10 standard bowl, or are you paying a fat premium for skill with scissors?

A focus on price can only be based on an underlying assumption that every haircut is the same. Of course they are not the same.

Knowledge-based services are not as fungible as they might appear on the outside.There are tiers of value. If you want the top tier, you have to pay for that.

It's time for a change

Managers regularly try to circumvent the purchasing process. I do not think they do this because they are lazy, corrupt or incompetent. I think this is solid evidence that the process is not serving them well.

All processes must evolve. It's time for purchasing to evolve to fit the needs of a knowledge-based economy and the need for innovation to drive competitive success.

Today's article was triggered by seeing a post on LinkedIn from Solution Focused Alan Kay, which instantly combusted with a pile of simmering frustration to produce this article. And therein is the virtue of collaboration -- the best stuff comes from human interaction, not isolation. Something to consider the next time you want to issue and RFP.

e-mail marketing for better or worse - how to make it better

2013-03-19T15:08:34-04:00

Most of the e-mail marketing I get is tiresome and banal. There's little to engage the imagination, no sense that people understand my world or even want to. It's all designed to push me to their website, where I am pushed to engage in a sales call, and have trouble getting any real information. (I recently read that the biggest complaint that users of B2B web sites have is the lack of price information. Yup, no doubt about that one.)

Many of the newsletters I get are not much better -- all pitch, all the time.

Every now and again, something breaks through in a significant way and catches my attention.

Today, it was Amy Boren, of Decision Point Consulting.

Starting point: a great subject line

"A day in the life of a Focus Group Moderator, are we correct?"

Two things done right here. She has a clue what I do for a living. And she asks a relevant question that makes me want to read on. So I did!

Tell a story

I loved this part. She talked about some fairly typical challenges that people like me have. How projects start out simple enough then quickly become complex. How timelines shrink. How we need to deliver within the original price even though things have changed. A little exaggeration for emphasis.

I kept reading and reading, right to the end.

Some decent pricing information provided -- not a lot, but enough that I didn't assume "I can't afford this". And a teaser that she would tell me more.

Anticipated some of my obvious questions and answered them in the story she told.

A picture of a real person. Amy herself, of course. There's nothing like a real person's picture to add credibility.

Made me feel like a) she's kind of cool, b) she understands my world and c) this might be a service I would want to use sometime.

My takeaway

If you think you understand the world of your customer, show them that. Prove it.

Tell stories instead of relating facts, to engage and intrigue. Show how you make a difference.

Advice we could all use.

Hey Amy, thanks for making my day, and inspiring this post!