I’ve consulted for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) for well over 10 years and back in early 2006 I was involved in developing a proposition around podcasting. 

The CIPD podcasts have gone from strength to strength and recently I was invited to participate in an episode on HR and Social Media.

• Full transcript on the CIPD website.
• Show notes on the CIPD website

Listen to more CIPD podcasts

It has been just over a year now since I started as Commercial Director at the specialist customer experience consultancy Foviance.

While reviewing the past 12 months I came across the presentation I gave to all staff on my first day and thought I’d share it here. It covers:

• The 3 interest areas required to be a leader (according to Charles Handy)
• My interest in Design for Behaviour

We launched our Multichannel Customer Experience Report today. Created in partnership with Econsultancy, the report contains some great insights into the current state of Customer Experience Management.

However it’s important to understand that multichannel customer experience is not a popular subject. There aren’t many boardrooms that host endless discussions on the subject.

The number of regularly published research and white papers on multichannel customer experience management are few and far between. Globally less than 130,000 English searches are undertaken on Google for ‘multichannel’ each month, for ‘multichannel customer experience’ it is less than 150 a month.

Multichannel customer experience is not a popular subject.

However it is an important subject. There have never been more channels through which our customers can potentially experience us. There are now more mobile phones in the world than toothbrushes. Of the UK total population of 61,800,000 Facebook appears to have accounts for 30,481,3002. Over the last 10 years this explosion of channels has dramatically changed our customers’ behaviour.

While mobile and social are just two of the more recent and high profile channels that our customers are using they are possibly the most important in setting customer expectations and establishing new customer behaviours.

At the start of the century the Internet had the effect of disintermediation – allowing customers to relate directly to many brands for the first time. Now our customers’ adoption of social media has had similar effects on customer-to-customer interactions. Much of this customer-to-customer exchange happens digitally but the subject of those exchanges cover every, and all, customer touch-points; on and offline, managed and unmanaged.

Online is now the place to share. The net effect is an amplification of the impact of both positive and negative customer experiences.

Talk, watch, test, survey and listen

At my company Foviance we spend a great deal of time with customers. We talk to them, we watch them, we test them, we survey them and we listen to them. Time and again we see their frustrations when they experience disruptions in their engagement with brands, but equally their awe and wonder when their journeys are frictionless and occasionally even enjoyable.

There aren’t many people out there focused on what is required to make customer experience management truly multichannel. That is a shame but also an opportunity for those that are. If you’re reading this consider yourself one of the elite and recognise that despite the challenges ahead the benefits of our journey are worth the effort.

The report comes in two parts:

1. a business focused report, which explores allows companies to benchmark themselves against their peers, and
2. a consumer survey report that provides five key industry sectors – travel, mobile, financial services, retail and gaming – an overview of the experiences they are providing for their customer (and allows them benchmark across industries.

The reports can be accessed from the Foviance website. I hope you find the report valuable. If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised just drop me a line or give me a bell on 08450 546 500 (International +448450 546 500)

I was in my early 20s before I touched a computer, one of Steve Jobs’. I’ve had a Mac in my house since 1992. Jobs helped shape my life.

As part of my ongoing series of customer engagement examples I’m highlighting the file hosting service Dropbox and their use of gamification to encourage participation in their service. Gamification, the integration of game mechanics into a website, service, community, campaign or application in order to drive engagement is a hot subject right now and this is a great example of how to get it right. (Stay tuned for a few examples of how to get it wrong.)

If you’ve seen any great examples of engagement I could feature in this series of posts please drop me a line.

Dropbox ‘Get Started’ page – gamification

Dropbox is one of those utilities I now find I can’t live without and I noticed this use of game mechanics (gamification) on their ‘Get Started’ page.

To encourage you to learn more about the product, use it and share with friends Dropbox have set a ‘quest’ to complete seven tasks. Your reward should you become a ‘Dropbox Guru’ is extra storage space. Motivating, fun and rewarding.

Other nice elements on the page include:

1. The tool tips describing what is necessary to complete each task that pop-up as you mouse over each line
2. The ‘Hide the Get Started tab’ option in the bottom left corner, allowing you to control the interface. This is a recognition that not everyone likes to play and that control itself creates engagement.
3. The ‘Upgrade’ option in to top right implies it is a positive thing to do and that it will be rewarding through the simple use of the star icon.

If you have seen any other great examples of gamification please share them below.

Nothing makes an idea or concept come to life better than a story or an example. So I’ve decided to create an ongoing series of posts simply showing some of the best examples of engagement I’ve seen.

If you know of anything I should feature please drop me a line.

Pizza Express – from QR code to iPhone App payment

Over the last six months the rise of QR codes for multichannel customer engagement and marketing has reached a tipping-point. Providing an easy way to use a smartphone to scan a small code in the real world and immediately access information or a service online means QR codes have started to crop up on posters, newspapers and even TV ads.

All too frequently these QR codes are simply used to link to an existing page on a website, however Pizza Express’ use recently caught my eye as an excellent example.

Like many parents I love the UK based restaurant chain. The food is a cut above the norm, they’re one of the most child-friendly outlets on the high street and their service is usually exemplary. On a recent visit I noticed a paper wrapper on the glass flower vase at the centre of the table featuring a QR code and promoting their new iPhone app.

Pizza Express provides free WiFi so scanning the image using an iPhone and installing their app takes a matter of 30 seconds. Once installed the app offers the menu, find-a-restaurant, table booking, news and special offers. However most impressive is the mobile bill payment once linked to an existing PayPal account (again less than a minute).

After your meal enter the number at the bottom of the bill into the app, choose how much service charge you wish to add and pay. Confirmation is made on screen, via an email and more impressively in our case, via the waitress who thanked us almost immediately – a great joined up service.

This experience provides value for both the restaurant and the customer. For me, the customer, I feel in control. Lack of control is one of the most important triggers for undermining engagement. I can imagine for time-pressed business lunches this control might make the difference in me choosing Pizza Express over another establishment. While I’ve never had a service problem at Pizza Express what the iPhone app provides is a reinforcement of that service brand value that is central to the food chain’s appeal.

For Pizza Express, they now have a direct route to market to me on a device I spend more time with than anything else in the world. They can capture data on my in-restaurant purchases and begin to understand that I’m not a regular visitor to any one store but instead a regular visitor to the chain – something thaat would previously have been difficult if not impossible.

Finally, Pizza Express has created a short-term talking point at the centre of the table that can travel beyond the restaurant to allow the brand to be talked about online – as witnessed here.

Download the Pizza Express iPhone app

Apple are making a big deal out of the multi-touch gestures that allow you to manipulate the interface in their new desktop OS (Lion). Lessons they’ve learnt from the iPad are rapidly impacting their other devices and software. Something Microsoft has perhaps been a bit slow doing following the success of their Xbox Kinect. Still I suspect it won’t be too much longer before a motion sensor approach to interaction is established for the desktop.

All these steps towards more ‘natural’, less mediated, methods of control and experience got me thinking. How do we develop this physicality further? Can we capture taste, weight and texture in the digital environment?

Clearly these things are physically impossible on the simple web pages or App. But that never stopped novelists or musicians striving in other mediums that seemingly didn’t lend themselves to the physical. In many ways the more abstract one is forced to be in creating these things, because of a lack of practical concreteness, the more effective and emotionally resonant something can become.

Poetry is perhaps the best example of a seemingly simple medium that can carry the heaviest weight of texture and tone.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
(Excerpt from Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney)

As the web changes and becomes a more fluid experience – moving from the old pageview-to-pageview approach, to a richer more dynamic set of interactions across multiple devices – surely there is the opportunity for the evocation of physical experiences. Perhaps we might even find a little poetry and emotional connectedness in even the harshest, commercially driven websites.

Now that would be a ‘user experience’.

Following a question from my son on the issue of real super‑heroes, I got to considering my own heroes. There are plenty of people I admire, but heroes? That’s a different category altogether. Only two eventually came to mind.

Initially, to help sort my thoughts, I started mapping my life against people who had inspired and influenced me, and to whom I owe a debt. Family aside my list included:

Frank Furedi: sociologist and author – taught me the meaning of politics
Tony Chisholm: School art teacher – helped me understand passion
Rob Killick: CEO of my previous company cScape – business learnings by osmosis
Dave Chaffey: marketeer and author – made me grasp the value in marketing
BJ Fogg: father of Captology – reawakened my fascination in psychology
Karl Marx: political economist – gave me the structure of analysis to interpret the world.

However the only people I’d place in my hero group are:

Hero 1: Norman Borlaug

Nobel prize winning Borlaug was a proponent of genetically engineered crops. He designed a dwarf wheat that combined the larger, heavier heads of the tall wheats, with the shorter, sturdier stems of the dwarf wheats to produce a strain that gave high yields but wasn’t susceptible to damage in strong rain and wind.

Subsequent developments allowed two crops per year. Borlaug wheats made a significant move towards ending world hunger.

Hero 2: Virginia Apgar

Apgar, a US doctor specialising in research on newborns and anaesthesiology, created a simple five criteria score card to rate newborn babies at one minute and five minutes after birth.
(The criteria were: 1. heart, 2. respiratory effort, 3. muscle tone, 4. reflex irritability, 5. colour)

The test is now known as the Apgar test. Each criteria can score a maximum of two points. A total score below five immediately flags up that something needs further investigation or the baby needs immediate treatment. The test is used internationally and has probably saved millions of lives.

If you fancy sharing your heroes or simply your thoughts on heroism don’t hold back.

[This post is an updated and adapted version of my first ever blog post. It was initially a response to the birth of my son and my concern that I was bringing him into a world lacking leadership and inspiration.]

A few months back I was interviewed by the CIM following my presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising – TFMA2011 – event.
The interview was part of the CIM’s project to identify the best marketing model. I chose SOSTAC.

What marketing model would you chose?

The CIM have given us 12 to select from:

7 Ps – marketing mix
Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence – these elements of the marketing mix form core tactical components of a marketing plan.

USP
Unique Selling Proposition is the concept that brands should make it clear to potential buyers why they are different and better than the competition.

Boston Consulting Group Matrix
This model categorises products in a portfolio as Stars, Cash Cows, Dogs and Question Marks, by looking at market growth and market share.

Brand positioning map
This model allows marketers to visualise a brand’s relative position in the market place by plotting consumer perceptions of the brand and competitor brands against the attributes that drive purchase.

Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is the concept used to assess what a customer is worth, based on the present value of future revenue attributed to a customer’s relationship with a product.

Growth strategy matrix
Ansoff’s matrix identifies alternative growth strategies by looking at present and potential products in current and future markets. The four growth strategies are market penetration, market development, product development and diversification.

Loyalty ladder
This model shows the steps a person takes before becoming loyal to a brand as they move through the stages of prospect, customer, client, supporter and advocate.

PESTLE
As an extension of the traditional PEST model, this analysis framework is used to assess the impact of macro-environmental factors on a product or brand – political, economical, social, technological, legal and economic.

Porter’s Five Forces
The five forces are Rivalry, Supplier power, Threat of substitutes, Buyer power and Barriers to entry and are used to analyse the industry context in which the organisation operates.

Product Life Cycle
This model plots the natural path of a product as it moves through the stages of Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation and Decline.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
This three stage process involves analysing which distinct customer groups exist and which segment the product best suits before implementing the communications strategy tailored for the chosen target group.

SOSTAC
This acronym stands for Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, Control and is a framework used when creating marketing plans.

Make your choice now:

One of the key challenges facing companies at the moment is extent to which they can, or even should, gain value from customer information available within social media.

If you or your company is interested in exploring this challenge I recommend the event ‘Social CRM 2011‘ on 6th May. It has an excellent line up of speakers and I’m sure will provide some considerable insight into what is currently a very hot subject matter.

Towards the end of the day I’ll be chairing the discussion:

SCRM & The Customer Perspective: Privacy, Ownership & Expectations

Fellow panelists include: Richard Hughes (BroadVision), Chris Butler (COO, WeCanDo.Biz), Brent Leary (CRM Essentials)

You can view the full programme and buy tickets from the Our Social Times website

Last week I presented at the Fusion Marketing Experience event in Brussels, and a top event it was. Really well organised, in an interesting location, with some excellent speakers.

Many thanks to the organisers but particularly J-P De Clerck for inviting me and all those who presented and attended who helped to make it such an enjoyable occassion. I’ve included a few of the presentations and taster videos below:

…and there is more

A few links to reviews, interviews and live blogging of the event:
Event report from Emailblog.eu
Interview with Joost de Valk
Speakers and presenters photo album
Exploring multichannel customer experience
Dela Quist: branding and the unexpected impact of email
Oliver Blanchard: Social media marketing, producing results
Interview with Jim Ducharme
Interview with J-P De Clerck
Interview with Oliver Blanchard
Interview with Andre Lejeune
Interview with Rich Hall

Last week I delivered the opening plenary at the latest Directors’ Forum event in London. The day was devoted to meeting the challenge of social and mobile customer enagement.

The organisers have published the presentations from Facebook, Linkedin, Nectar, Gallup and the others on the Directors’ Forum website. Mine is also available below.

I was honoured to be among those asked to present at last night’s Fantastic Tavern. The presentations were all on themes we felt were critical for the next year. Mine was on ‘attention’ and the increased need for concentration to be productive, creative and happy.

View the presentation slides below.

[Thanks to Matt and Michelle for organising and the invite.]

]]> http://www.richard-sedley.net/2011/02/time-and-the-attention-deficit/feed/ 1 http://www.richard-sedley.net/2011/02/fusion-marketing-experience-brussels/ http://www.richard-sedley.net/2011/02/fusion-marketing-experience-brussels/#comments Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:31:28 +0000 Richard Sedley http://www.richard-sedley.net/?p=1079 Find out more about Richard Sedley http://www.richard-sedley.net/about/

The preliminary line up for the Fusion Marketing Experience event in March has just been announced. I'll be presenting a keynote and then running an interactive workshop on Managing the Multichannel Experience.

Last month I was interviewed by Giedrius Ivanauskas over at Social Media Citizens. I thought I’d share some of the Q&A here:

How and why did you get into Social Media?

Back at the turn of the century I worked with a number of clients developing online customer communities. My focus was on adoption and the psychology of customer-to-customer, and customer-to-brand interactions. It was really from there that we developed our approach to engagement.

If you’re interested in communities I still think that Design for Community by Derek Powazek is one of the best books published.

What’s it like to be a real Social Media Citizen?

Mmm. Interesting question. I used to think about social media a lot, now I don’t. I guess it’s just integrated into the fabric of everyday life. I check Twitter before I do my email, I manage my public profile online like I think about what I’m going to wear in the morning and everything I discuss with clients starts from a Social Media perspective. Customer centricity for my clients means ‘digital by default’. (Not everything ends up centred on Social Media but it certainly starts there with research etc.)

What are your favourite social media hang-out sites? Why?

I love Twitter and could spend hours just hanging out reading and conversing but I’ve started to be more disciplined over the last year. I try to use Pomorodo Cycles to maintain productivity at work.

Twitter has changed the sentiment of the web for me. It’s made it a much nicer place to hang out. Twitter is my coffee bar where I can meet, greet, exchange and over-hear.

The site that has delivered me the most value over the longest period of time has to be Delicious. I use it to fill the gaps in my memory, as a search engine, as a collaboration tool, to create bespoke RSS feeds, to find potential clients and in loads of other ways as well.

You’re welcome to follow the links I save at http://www.delicious.com/cs02uk

How do you keep up-to-date with the Social Media environment?

Twitter is my primary source of useful content but I have recently revived my use of RSS readers. (I had stopped using them a few years back preferring to rely on the serendipity of Twitter). Instapaper is a must have to allow me to read later what might distract me at the time.

My favourite RSS readers are:

Mac: NetNewsWire
PC: FeedDemon
iPad: Reeder
all synced with Google Reader.
Instapaper

How would you define a Social Media Citizen?

‘Someone who contributes to the value of the Social Media space.’

This is really more to do with the nature of the social objects they share in the space rather than the connections they have.

Who are your Top Social Media Citizens (bloggers, social entrepreneurs etc.)?

I generally only follow people I get a lot of value from so you can find them here: http://twitter.com/richardsedley/following

These four people are all specialists in their field who I rely on, and can heartly recommend:

Digital Marketing: Dr Dave Chaffey (@davechaffey)
Finance sector: Ron Shevlin (@rshevlin)
Customer service: Guy Stephens (@guy1067)
Not-for-profit sector: Steve Bridger (@stevebridger)

What are your favourite marketing/PR tools on Social Media?

I really like Facebook’s ad platform. The targeting capacity and insights you can gain make it one of the most power tools we have. Let me give you an example.

I worked with Diabetes UK and they were creating ads to A/B test copy and value propositions that would be used offline. For a couple of hundred pounds they were able to show ideas to thousands upon thousands of their target audience and work out how to optimise some expensive print material – brilliant.

What’s your secret to Social Media Marketing?

I don’t really think there is a secret to Social Media Marketing – just hard work, attention to details and delivering value.

If I were to share an insight into networking it would have to be you need to like people. People trust people that like them because they feel safe. Many just start from a default position of mistrust and these individuals will always struggle in the social space.

What are your favourite Social Media case studies (campaigns)?

No question the best is still Greenpeace’s Green My Apple campaign. http://www.greenmyapple.org. It used the social space almost perfectly.

Greenpeace wanted to put pressure on Apple Computers to improve their environmental credentials. But having a pop at Apple can be difficult because there are so many Apple evangelists ready to stand up and pop back. So instead Greenpeace said they really loved Apple computers but that they’d love them even more if their computers were greener – turning evangelism into an amplifier for the campaign. They called on all Apple fans to share a video, photo or audio clip that echoed this Greenpeace ‘call-to-action’ and to upload it to any social media with the tag #greenmyapple.

Content with this tag was then pulled into the site. This has become a technique we see used a lot now by various campaigns, but rarely with as much humour, sophistication and commitment as in the Green My Apple campaign.

How Social Media changed your life?

I think it just touches everything I do to a greater or lesser extent. My appreciation of my football team is increased through conversations I have online, my friends and family get to experience my kids, even my Saturday nights are bearable as I tune into Twitter to join the discussion on the Xfactor contestants.

What don’t you like about Social Media?

I think I sometimes feel a need to perform in order to maintain a consistent persona and as I mentioned before it can be distracting.

What is the funniest/most unexpected thing that happened to you due to Social Media?

I genuinely thought I had an online storker. My role as Course Director for Social Media at the Chartered Institute of Marketing means that I try to join and try out as many different networks and tools as possible. For about six months someone was ‘friending’ me everywhere.

Then out of the blue I received an invite to present at an event in Barcelona. He was just checking me out as part of an event he was programming. We are now real friends and I’ve spoken for him a number of times.

What do you see in the future for the Social Media?

The future of social media really rests inside the enterprise. If it is to profoundly change the way we do business the tools and associated behaviours need to impact how we manage people, innovate and organise – not just market and communicate.

Describe yourself in five words?

Bald, Enthusiastic, Friendly, Persuasive, Political

My thanks to Giedrius and Social Media Citizens for letting me reproduce this interview here.

Earlier this month I presented at the Design for Persuasion conference in Ghent, Belgium. Organised by Christel De Meyer and BJ Fogg, this has become Europe’s leading event focused around learning techniques and principles on design that encourages behaviour change.

Last year I presented 6 techniques that you can use to persuade, this year I looked at the growing use of Game Mechanics online to encourage user engagement. I’m in the process of writing up a more comprehensive article based on my presentation but as a stop-gap I thought I’d share a few thoughts about the event and four mini-interviews that were conducted with some speakers by Martin Couzins.

Highlights for me were Dan Lockton and BJ’s presentations. Dan’s Design with Intent toolkit is an excellent reference for all designers and marketers, and it sits on my desk as a much used resource. His presentation focused on shifting mental models and is something often underplayed in the persuasion field in favour of a pure-play focus on behaviour.

Developing habits

BJ shared his thoughts on the creation of habits. Triggered habits being something that you do when driven by an occasional need or external stimulus (BJ always goes to Amazon when he wants to buy a book) and Cyclical habits being those that you do regularly, probably everyday. BJ talked through the development and use of his Behavior Grid to encourage and sustain behaviours and turn them into habits.

Since his presentation I’ve been experimenting with how we might be able to develop regular micro-behaviours in a customer that establish a habitual relationship with a company.

No longer a dirty word

The idea of persuasion, and the importance of behaviour change, has become fairly mainstream, something that the conference drew attention to. This is certainly the case in the UK where the government have embraced behavioural economics and they’ve emphasised the need to see real results rather than simply awareness from funded health campaigns like Drink Aware.

There is still a small amount of ethical concern around the subject but it tends to fall mainly into the anti-corporate, anti-big business camp while the use of persuasion for environmental or health matters is rarely questioned. I have to confess that personally I find this much more worrying because I’m always deeply suspicious of those who believe they have a moral certainly on their side – history has proved that these are the frameworks in which abuse takes place. [See this road safety video as an example]

I thought the event was a great success and I’d like to congratulate the organisers.

BJ Fogg talks about the creation of habits

Dan Lockton on The Design with Intent toolkit

Richard Sedley On Game Mechanics and persuasion

Laura Walker Hudson on the use of SMS

One of the biggest challenges facing those of us developing online customer engagement initiatives is the lack of time and attention we can demand from our audiences. Indeed the reality for many today is that we live in the fastest paced, most information rich, stimulating, attention demanding and distracting world that humanity has ever known. This is taking its toll on both our customers and our marketing and engagement efforts. Even the best laid and most value laden engagement plans will come to nothing if our customers don’t understand the value of what we’re offering or stick around long enough to experience it.

Step forwards one of the oldest techniques for engagement humanity has ever used, storytelling.

At their simplest stories are merely retellings of a cause and effect relationship. For example, “I forgot my wallet today so had to walk to work and arrived late.” This is admittedly not a very inspiring story but it is a story non-the-less, while “I woke up this morning, went to work and had lunch”, is merely a chain of events and not a story. The key difference here lies in the fact that, unlike the second statement, from the first you can draw a lesson. i.e. if you forget your wallet you’re likely to be late for work.

Throughout the history of humanity stories have been one of the best ways that we have assimilated and passed down our understanding of what is valuable or dangerous to our kind. As a result stories have become one of the key organising principles of the mind. (It has even been argued that our brains are hard wired for stories. In 2001 a gene called FOXP2 was apparently discovered making narrative possible.) Our brains are now conditioned to seek out and identify stories wherever they may lurk. Even where stories don’t really exist we try to find them to rationalise and explain the actions of others and ourselves.

So how can we use stories within our online customer and employee engagement strategies?

Provide a reason to boast

My wife often tells the story of how she went to the last ever Stone Roses gig. If you press her on the matter she confesses that it was OK, but probably not the best concert she’s been to. What makes her share this story more than any other is that it was the final time the Stone Roses played, which she learnt after the event. Only once the dust had settled and the ringing in her ears had subsided did she understand that she had seen something special.

Do you make your customers feel they are taking part in something special by choosing your products or services? A simple way is giving your customers information that confirms they made the right choice. If your current customers are potentially your best sales force, why not give them the tools to spread the word?

Was your event the best attended, the first or the last? Do other well-respected companies, individuals; academic institutions or governments use your product? Select facts that confirm your customer’s wise decision in choosing you and help to ensure that others will get to hear about that choice, too.

Tell ‘em why

Too often we kid ourselves that we have provided our customers with enough information to make the decision. We load our web pages with facts and stats, features and benefits, functions and costs. But how often do we explain the ‘why’ behind these details?

• Why are we selling this?

• Why are we providing this service?

• Why is it this price?

• Why did we write this?

• Why is it available in these colours? etc.

In the absence of an explanation from us our customers will write their own stories to fill these gaps and we will have squandered an opportunity to help write those stories to our advantage.

Show them the consequences

Behind every online action that is an off-line consequence. For every purchase of a toaster there is a full stomach in the morning, for every book bought there is a person reading on a commute to work, for every course attended there is a new friend met and for every article read there is a water cooler moment. By helping our customers understand the consequences of their online actions with us we are helping them write the happy endings for their stories.

The two most powerful, and least contrived, ways we can do this online are through the use of images/video and user generated content. Visuals showing real usage of our service or product allow our customers to imagine themselves at the end of the customer journey ‘pre-purchase’. While allowing other customer to share their stories similarly permits people an insight into the future.

Stories are the most important way our mind makes sense of our world. As that world becomes more hectic and as greater demands are placed on us so stories become an essential way for us to navigate these demands. Our customers are already writing these stories for themselves; it seems churlish not to provide the characters, scenery and script to help them.

The 5 elements of a great story

PASSION to make your listeners care about the outcome

A HERO to drive the action

An ANTAGONIST to challenge the hero

A moment of AWARENESS where the hero realises how to over come his of her obstacles

TRANSFORMATION wherein the hero accomplishes his or her desired goal

[From Maxwell & Dickman, The Elements of Persuasion]

Do your images tell a story?

Not every picture tells a story, but with a bit of thought they can. Can you spot the story in this comparison of two adverts? Using eyetracking software the ‘after’ images show where the viewer’s gaze is concentrated.

[Thanks to Rob at Think Eyetracking for permission to use this eyetracking test.]

I’ve been rereading a number of my old articles as part of a wider assessment of my work before I make some career decisions. I came across this one written for the now defunct Customer Magazine and thought some of the points within, especially towards the end, still had salience. [Originally published October 2008]

If there is one thing that every previous economic slowdown, downturn, recession or slump has proved, it is that there will be winners and losers. The situation created by the current credit crunch is no different. Already the effects of the tightening of credit are moving beyond the housing and financial sectors and are impacting on both the business and customer mindset.

However simply recognising that the next few years are likely to be very tough, and executing a strategy that not only ensures survival, but also positions a company to take advantage of the economic situation, are two very different things. The severe lack of management experience when it comes to weathering market storms almost guarantees that many companies will make a succession of ill judged decisions. Nowhere can these decisions have more long-term consequence than in the field of customer relationships.

When the economy is slowing, customer centric budgets have historically been among the first to fall under the CFO’s knife. Arguments focused on ROI and life-time customer value can sometimes stay the blade, but it is always wise to have a parallel strategy that recognises times are tight and seeks to maximise the impact of restricted funding. Step forward the concept of ‘The Flight to Quality’.

‘Flight to quality’ is a term traditionally used to describe the action of financial investors in moving funds away from riskier investments to the safest possible investment vehicles. For the customer centric business it can take on a dual meaning. Firstly it centres on recognising that not all customers are equal to us. Understanding which customers deliver the greatest returns for our business allows us to focus on expanding our pool of these ‘quality’ customers. Of course it is a good idea to do this at anytime but in a troubled economy it becomes essential.

Secondly we can understand Flight to Quality from a customer’s point of view. In both the B2B and B2C space we are already seeing customers, both businesses and consumers, narrowing the field of their expenditure. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily spending less, although many are, what it does mean is that they are allocating their resources in a more focused manner, according to their own changing definitions of quality.

At times of economic certainty quality can be found in risk taking, experimentation and in the practice of investing in widely diverse areas of interest. In less certain economic periods our natural tendency is to reduce the risk taking, be more conservative and concentrate on the things we know. In the words of management guru Peter Drucker, “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.” (Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Harper & Row. 1985)

Escape from reality

Of course to some customers price will be the key quality during an economic downturn. But if we assume that it is the sole, or indeed the most important motivating quality, we will have missed the more subtle interaction between the changing economic environment and our customer’s psychology, and ultimately their behavioural patterns.

For example in previous recessions the cinema and the gambling industry had always fared well. Indeed gambling was regarded, along with vice, as probably the only recession proof industry.

Las Vegas might well have expected the effects of the credit crunch in the US to follow similar economic downturns, where, like much of the entertainment industry, they benefited from the escapist urges of consumers. However this time things seem different. So far this year Vegas revenues have fallen 4 percent, the first fall since 1970, excluding the aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11. (Steve Friess, Down on Its Luck, Las Vegas used to be a recession-proof oasis. Not anymore. Newsweek, 5 May 2008)

The consumer’s desire to temporarily evade the economic realities of life is as strong as ever but it appears to be taking alternative expressions. For example we are seeing a much stronger than expected performance of electronic goods. Overall demand for gadgets in the US saw consumer electronic sales up an annualised 4.8 per cent.

Particular electronic goods offer an outlet for our customer’s escapist urges but continue to mine key trends that have developed over the last 10 years. The trends towards mobility and simplification for example. Products like the Flip Video (www.theflip.com), a simple hand-held video recorder have stolen customer hearts as much as marketshare (over 13% of all camcorders in the US in less than 12 months).

A number of products and services have done well to identify and build on other customer trends from the last few years, trends that have intensified as a result of the economic downturn. The trend towards sharing and consumer generated content for example is combining with the more traditional recessionary quality that focuses on family orientation of purchases.

Smarter companies are already beginning to repose their marketing and customer focus around these qualities. The home cinema that was once aimed at the ‘boy toy’ market now provides a family environment where the consumer can feel responsible and protective. The games console that was once about shoot-em-up challenges is now family friendly and can be used to share videos and photos of the latest edition to the brood.

Where once the qualities of the spinning wheels on the slot machine and the car trip to the cinema triumphed in a recession. We now have the Nintendo Wii, the Flip, the laptop and the smartphone reigning supreme.

Less is more

It has been widely observed that consumer purchasing is becoming more polarised as they simultaneously trade-up and trade-down. Buying at both ends of the price spectrum is now fairly well understood. Customers buy from the cheap end for things that they consider unimportant or undifferentiated, and are prepared to buy from the expensive end for those products and services that they have an emotional attachment to or see as unique. As a consequence the middle gets squeezed.

Less obvious is the role of ‘decluttering’ and ‘repurposing’ in the customer mindset. The rise of eBay and other online reuse services like Facebook auctions and Free-cycle, a free gift network, make an important emotional connection with consumers. The desire to ‘do the right thing’, recycle and protect the environment dovetails into economic pressures to produce a mindset that imbues secondhand with positive, rather than negative qualities.

A number of smart companies are already looking at integrating a secondhand offering into their services, much like Amazon does with secondhand books. After all why just sell a product once when you can sell it over and over again.

From quality to engagement

Using the Flight to Quality concept is all about understanding how our customers recognise what is important to them while they are under the financial and emotional pressure. Whether it is the rise in sales of luxury cosmetic or weight-management products to improve self-worth at a time when we can feel least in control of our lives, or a growth in pet insurance attributable to a concentration on family values, this understanding is key to building and sustaining customer relationships.

These are the qualities upon which we must build our customer engagement strategies. Those companies that meet our customer’s quality criteria will be best placed to emerge winners from the current economic situation, those that don’t have a lot to lose.

It’s perhaps hard to imagine now but even just four years ago talk of Customer Engagement was a bit of a rarity. Back in 2006 a Google Alert on the phrase ‘customer engagement’ would receive an average of just two alerts a week. Today, when combined with a Twitter search, the numbers are more like 30 mentions each hour.

There are many excellent reasons why businesses now focus on engagement. This year’s Annual Customer Engagement Report reveals some of the most important, for example ‘increasing customer value’, ‘gaining customer insights’, ‘increasing value delivered to the customer’ etc. (see below).

However while any or all of these are excellent outcomes from engagement they are rarely the best place to start when developing a robust Customer Engagement strategy. For that we need to understand the four main challenges to engagement that have come to define customer relationships this millennium.

Back in 2007 I had the opportunity to interview BJ Fogg, author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. BJ established the Stanford Captology Lab and has done a whole lot of other cool stuff you can find out about on his website www.bjfogg.com.

Last year following our presentations at the 1st Design for Persuasion conference I spent a great evening with BJ and Dan Lockton discussing politics, ethics and of course persuasion mechanics. Something I’m hoping to repeat this year. Make sure you join us at the 2nd Design for Persuasion Conference on the 30th September in Ghent, Belgium.

Podcast interview with BJ Fogg from 2007

Design for Persuasion 2010 videos